


the moral of the story

by Norbury



Category: Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Attempted Murder, Bad Flirting, Bisexual Peter Parker, Blood and Gore, Blow Jobs, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Coming Out, Getting Together, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Hand Jobs, Hook-Up, Hurt/Comfort, Invasion of Privacy, M/M, Major Character Injury, Mystery, Panic Attacks, Pansexual Wade Wilson, Past Relationship(s), Peter Parker Has Panic Attacks, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Secret Identity, Semi-Public Sex, Sex, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Smut, Stealing, Very slightly implied homophobia, Wade Wilson Breaking the Fourth Wall, Wade Wilson Takes Care of Peter Parker, couldn't be me the fucking plot keeps getting in the way lmao, guys im worried when i write in plot the only tags are about how there is no plot lmao, if youre worried neither peter nor wade die so rest easy, oh look peter has his own tag for panic attacks nice, okay so it isn't as bad as it sounds lol. but ppl do try to kill other ppl.. so murder, plot heavy, yall dont do plots in fanfiction??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:40:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 61,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27472906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Norbury/pseuds/Norbury
Summary: It's early spring and Peter is once again reminded about the worst mistake he's ever made, MJ is worried about Harry's health, and a mysterious stranger has arrived back in town.Peter's past is slowly gaining on him, and he wants nothing more than to just forget, but MJ's being quite insistent on roping Peter back into Harry's life. She doesn’t know that Peter is keeping a horrible secret, one that’s eating both him and Harry alive. When Peter runs into a man, who calls himself Deadpool, he’s intrigued. He just might be the distraction Peter needs from the blood on his hands that he just can’t seem to wash off.A slow burn love story draped in mystery, about giving yourself and others the benefit of the doubt, falling in love, and rekindling lost friendships.
Relationships: Harry Osborn & Peter Parker, Past Peter Parker/Gwen Stacy - Relationship, Past Peter Parker/Mary Jane Watson - Relationship, Peter Parker & Mary Jane Watson, Peter Parker/Wade Wilson
Comments: 41
Kudos: 102





	1. goodbye and hello

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for clicking into my fic :)  
> This is a first multi chapter fic I've ever written. 
> 
> I hope this first chapter will get you interested! My Tumblr is [knitcowboy](https://knitcowboy.tumblr.com/) come check me out! :)
> 
> Let me know what you think! I hope I have piqued your interest !
> 
> (if you're here only for the smut, check out chapters 6 and 9, near the end of both chapters. xoxo gossip girl)

It’s windy out there, Peter thinks distantly as he stares outside. His reflection is barely visible on the big window, it’s almost like he’s looking through a reflection on the surface of clear water, and the wind outside flinging a plastic bag across the street is a current running deep underwater.

He saw the same nightmare last night and it occupies his mind again:

Mr. Norman Osborn clings to his arms. He’s heavy, and it’s hard to move with his almost limp body weighing on him. Peter stays in the shadows when it’s possible, and he can feel Mr. Osborn’s sharp fingernails digging into his suit. His other hand clings to his neck, but he has barely any strength to strangle him anymore. Peter feels him slipping on every upswing, and he has to adjust his hold on him constantly. Mr. Osborn tried to say something when he had first picked him up and set on his way, but now is capable only of hard puffs and almost animal like wailing.

It’s not too much further anymore. Peter can already spot the Osborn penthouse in the distance. It’s light as if with a stagelight. The dark cloudy sky stands threateningly behind it, and Peter very much feels like he’s on stage; Everyone’s watching.

But no one is, the city is almost uncharacteristically empty, and the only witness he has is Mr. Osborn, who’s on his way to taking all he knows with him.

Peter lands roughly on the balcony, and Mr. Osborn slips from his hands and thumps on the beautiful, expensive tile floor. When Peter picks him up, he can see the bloody puddle that already has formed under him. The balcony is draped in shadows, but he can see the blood on not just Mr. Osborn, but on him as well. He can smell iron, clearly, even through his mask, and a similar taste rises on his tongue.

He drags Mr. Osborn’s half dead body inside, and sets him onto the fainting sofa. He places his hands on his chest, and Mr. Osborn looks almost peaceful like that. Peter takes a step back, and he can see Mr. Osborn’s half open eyes deliriously looking for him, until they spot him. He turns, and lets out a sad, horrible wail, but as if gathering one final burst of strength he stops and then breathes in as deeply as his body allows. He doesn’t break eye contact with Peter for one second.

“Look me in the eye like a man, Parker.”

Peter takes a step back.

“Don’t hide behind that thing, you coward.”

For some reason Peter grants him his last wish, and takes his mask off with one shaky hand. Mr. Osborn stares at him, then turns to look at his dying body. He grazes one of his fatal wounds, lifts his hand as if to make sure that he’s bleeding real blood, and then his hand falls limp to the side and his eyes roll back. Peter can see a trail of blood coming from the balcony to the living room, and the big red stain forming under Mr. Osborn.

Peter’s ears ring, and he’s literally stuck on his feet. He can hear that Mr. Osborn is not breathing anymore.

He should remove his suit, Peter thinks, and somehow steps closer to the body. Mr. Osborn has his green armor still on, but it hadn’t saved him in the end. Peter can clearly see the two piercing wounds on his torso. He stares at them, and almost doesn’t believe they’re real. If he just closes his eyes and opens them up again Mr. Osborn will be alive and just as happy as he was on the day he and Harry had graduated high school together.

His breath shakes as he steps yet a bit closer. He puts his hands on his upper body. He feels perverse undressing Mr. Osborn, but he has to do it. Has to. Every time his gloved fingers even graze Mr. Osborn’s still disgustingly warm skin he pulls his hands away. The Green Goblin mask is where Mr. Osborn had suffered his fatal blow, but Peter doesn’t think he can go back to discard it. The armor, he’ll go throw into the sea.

He’s almost afraid that Mr. Osborn will suddenly grab his hand, but it never happens.

Peter webs together all the pieces he takes off and carries them as a one big bundle to the balcony. He’s almost off, when he realizes that he doesn’t have the mask anymore. Peter has to go back inside, into the dark living room with the body to retrieve it. He can already see it from the balcony, and picks it up as fast as he can. His hands smell like Mr. Osborn’s death, and it sticks to the mask as he puts it on.

He should leave. But some other force makes him look at his handiwork just once more.

Mr. Osborn’s body lies almost restfully on the fainting sofa. His eyes are still open, and his fingers are red from his own blood. He looks small and unthreatening in his underwear. Peter goes near him once more to close his eyes. And with that he looks almost like he’s just fallen asleep. Mouth open as if he’s snoring.

“I’m sorry,” Peter whispers and almost expects Mr. Osborn to answer back, but of course he doesn’t.

Peter can hear the lock click in the front door, and suddenly a cone of light runs across the room and splashes on him and Mr. Osborn.

“Spider-Man?” Harry asks, and for a fleeting moment Peter and Harry stare right at each other, until Peter turns away and jumps straight into the blackness outside with the bundle.

His heart has never beaten this fast, and he’s almost afraid that he’ll die from a heart attack right at this moment, with all this blood on his hands. He feels as if he’s going to be sick.

The sea swallows all the evidence with good appetite. It eats both the Green Goblin armor and the filthy Spider-Man suit. Peter weights them down with rocks. He walks home in clothes he had hidden nearby some time ago. It’s just a T-shirt and sweatpants. No shoes or socks. He tries his best to hide his red, stained skin and when he gets home he finally gets sick. He gets into the shower he can’t clean himself well enough.

In the morning he had woken up cold and sweaty, as if it had all happened just yesterday.

Peter stares out the window, goosebumps rising on his skin.

“Peter!” MJ huffs out and pokes him not so gently in the arm. “Could you focus?”

Peter blinks.

They’re sitting in a small café. MJ had bought Peter a coffee and a pastry, that still sits untouched on its plate, long cold. It’s a cosy café, with a warm and welcoming atmosphere, but it is so out of Peter’s budget that he normally wouldn’t even have glanced at the place.

“Yeah! Yeah, of course… What were you saying?” Peter says. A bit disoriented.

“I was talking about Harry.”

“Right!”

“… That I’m worried about him.”

“Oh… right,” Peter says.

“Weren’t you listening at all?” MJ sounds annoyed. And rightfully so, Peter had zoned out a while ago. He’s been doing that a lot lately.

“I was!” he says, “But could you repeat it anyway?”

“Sometimes I wonder why I put up with you,” MJ says under her breath, but they both know Peter can hear her full well, “I haven’t seen him in a while, and I’m just worried. It’s the anniversary of his dad’s death soon. I think he might be self-isolating, and I don’t want him to be alone at a time like this. You know how he can get.”

Peter did know how he could get. The problem just was that Harry often unloaded all his anger and frustrations on Peter, and he didn’t have the mental energy to just sit there and take all the abuse anymore. Even if he was more than culpable for his father’s death, not that Harry knew that, or at least he didn’t blame _Peter_. Peter picks at the skin on his thumb.

Of course, a parent’s death was hard to process, especially one so violent and sudden as Mr. Norman Osborn’s. Peter had lost three parent figures already; he knew exactly how Harry felt, but Peter couldn’t go back in time to fix any of it, it was something Harry himself had to come to terms with. And Peter, too. There’s a limit on how long Peter could try and fix all the problems in their friendship and deal with his guilt, but that limit had been long passed. Apparently MJ was still willing to fight for Harry.

Then again, she doesn’t have to bear the guilt and accusations Peter has to. MJ knows Peter’s alter-ego, Harry doesn’t, but MJ doesn’t know about Mr. Norman Osborn and what Harry had seen and what Peter had done.

“We should go check on him,” MJ says.

“I don’t think he’d want to see me, MJ.”

“Come on Peter! He’s our friend!” she argues.

“No, you’re his friend. I haven’t even spoken to him in forever.” It had been months since Peter had even texted Harry. It did hurt to lose such an old friend, but what could Peter even do anymore? He had tried. He had tried so long! But everything was starting to weigh on him.

“Then he’ll be even happier to see you,” she says, “show him you care.”

“MJ,” Peter says, his voice tired, “I just… We haven’t even spoken-”

“I just don’t understand why you two can’t work it out,” she says, “Whatever happened between you two? You were the best of friends in high school and in college.”

“I don’t… know.” Peter picks up his pastry and bites into it.

“Please come with me,” she tries again.

“Alright. I’ll think about it,” he answers, brushing crumbs from his lips, knowing that he most definitely wasn’t coming with her to check on Harry. Or at least he doesn’t want to at all. Of course, he wants him to be okay, he does care about him after all, but his presence won’t cheer Harry up anymore than seeing Harry will cheer him up.

* * *

There are three guys. Bulky, very strong looking. The late evening sun splatters into the semi-closed off courtyard as soft lines. Peter had just dropped by to ask where they were heading with those baseball bats, and one had shot at him at sight. Thankfully the bullet hadn’t hit, Peter had dodged to the left almost on instinct.

“Hey!” he yells, swinging above them in a long curve, “That’s not nice!”

One of the men, the one who had shot at him, aims again, his bat lies useless on the ground next to his feet. He’s the smallest of the three, but still considerably larger than Peter. The two other men seem to tighten their grips on their bats, and fix their stances to be more stable and fight ready. None of them answer him.

Before the man takes another shot, Peter shoots a string of web straight in the middle of his chest and yanks him violently forward. He stumbles and Peter pulls himself flying across the air to collide with him. The man swings at him with the gun. The hit is not accurate at all and there is no strength behind it. Peter blocks it easily and wrestles the gun off of him. He throws the gun further away, and it scatters on the ground. The man huffs a strong coffee smelling puff of air into Peter’s face, as Peter punches his stomach, causing the man to fall hard on his back.

“Stay down,” Peter quips, as he webs the man’s face to stick to the ground. He struggles to pull the webbing off of his face but can’t. He resorts to pat the ground in desperate search for the gun he lost, but it’s nowhere close to him. Peter notes that his new formula seems to be stronger than the last, before he turns his attention back to the two other men.

One of them is a lot closer than he anticipated, and he barely dodges the bat swinging straight for his head. That would have hurt. The man overbalances and almost falls, Peter takes the opportunity to kick his side, completing his fall with a painful crack as the man apparently rolls his ankle on his way down.

Peter gets an inkling suddenly to jump to the opposite way from the man he just kicked. He doesn’t stop to question it, if he had learned one thing as Spider-Man, it was to follow his instinct during fights. And it’s good he does, a bullet hits the place he just stood in and ricochets from the asphalt and almost hits the man stuck to the ground with Peter’s webs.

Peter would say something funny, but before he can even process what’s happening, the man with a rolled ankle tackles him from the right. He’s hanging from Peter’s back, the bat is lodged under Peter’s chin, and he’s almost impossible to shake off. Peter can see the guy in front of him aiming his gun again, apparently not really caring if he hits his buddy also. So much for comradery, Peter thinks. Peter grabs the bat and pushes it away from himself with full force. He can hear the man’s other shoulder dislocate with a disgusting sound.

“Sorry about that,” he says and shakes the man completely off. He flops to the ground to nurse his arm and ankle. Peter spots a gun peeking from under the guy’s shirt, and shoots a string of web to retreat it.

The other man wastes no time to take another shot, and Peter doesn’t dodge this one nearly as well as the other ones. It scrapes his side, cutting open his suit and drawing some blood. It burns, but he doesn’t have time to attend to his minor wound. He jumps onto the wall, and turns the gun in his hand. He so rarely holds one.

“Look, now we both have guns,” he says, spinning his one in his hand.

“You don’t even know how to use it,” the man says back. The first thing any of them have said the whole fight. His voice is surprisingly placid. He takes a slow step to the left, the barrel follows Peter as he, too, moves on the wall.

“I think I can work it out,” he says, and throws it at the man. It doesn’t hit him, but distracts him enough so his shot misses Peter, and he can hurl himself from the wall onto the man. He plans on punching him, but the fight ends almost anticlimactically; The man hits the back of his head hard to the ground, making a heavy sound, and passes straight out.

“Oh.” Guess that’s that then. Not his best fight. He turns to look at the man with the dislocated shoulder. He’s gotten up to pick up the third gun that had slid to the side. Peter shoots a web to the back of his knees almost boredly. The man trips and hits the asphalt in a painful looking way. Peter secures the passed out guy’s hands and feet with his webs and turns him onto his side. He walks over to the other man who’s trying to rip off the webs from his legs with his good hand.

Peter nudges him with his boot.

“Care to tell me what you guys were doing?”

The man spits at him, but his saliva is slimy and thick, it hangs from his mouth almost sadly.

“Yeah, I figured as much,” Peter says, and shoots a web trapping the man’s still working hand to the ground. “Have a nice day, then,” he says and leaves, before the cops show up.

What a useless fight. And a bad one, too. Peter runs his gloved hand over the bullet scrape. He’s still bleeding a little bit.

* * *

Peter swings almost on autopilot. He can feel the wound ripping bigger as he moves. He should stop somewhere to nurse it. He can feel warm blood idly soak the spandex around it.

It starts raining.

Peter swings most of the way to the docks. There are people all over the city. It’s true when they say that New York is a city that never sleeps. And probably, Peter thinks, no one living there sleeps either. He certainly doesn’t. Not a lot anyway. Sometimes it feels weird thinking how everyone else has a life, too. What do they do every day? Whom do they live with? Are they happy? What do they dream about?

Who loves them?

Sometimes Peter feels like no one really loves him. Not anymore at least. MJ only tolerates him; it has been awkward since they broke up. Harry definitely doesn’t like him. Gwen… Uncle Ben… gone. Guess there’s Aunt May. He should text her back soon. Maybe even call her.

The sea looks almost hypnotic. Peter sits down on the ground, turning around to take a good look at the injury. It’s not too bad. The bullet just scraped him, just like he originally thought. He shoots some of his webbing to stanch the blood flow. He turns back to look at the water, crossing his arms over the railing separating the docks from the black sea, his feet hanging over. Sometimes a wave licks the bottoms of his boots. The water mills around, it doesn’t seem to have a direction at all. Peter feels weirdly similar.

An orange light glows softly from the surrounding city, and Peter can see spotlights here and there illuminating the rain clouds hanging over him. The white light from the spotlights catch the raindrops in the air and it looks like there are impossibly long curtains dangling from the clouds.

It looks very beautiful, Peter thinks.

There are people around, homeless kids, sex workers, street dancers, people passing by. He ignores them and they ignore him. He didn’t swing here, he walked the rest of the way. He could very well be just one of those Spider-Man imitators, and not the original one. The wind howls and the rain seem to get only stronger. Peter doesn’t feel cold, he can barely feel the wind through the suit at all. It separates him from the rest of the city. He rests his head against his arms. The wind screams.

It’s a million city, but now it is just Peter and the sea. Black and orange. Just raging somewhere over there.

Peter distantly thinks about Mr. Osborn and Harry. He’s almost angry that MJ wants to check up on him. If she could just…

Peter wants someone to just hug him tight. And… forgive him? No. He doesn’t need ~~deserve~~ forgiveness. He should just forget about the whole thing. But it’s not easy, having this yearly reminder that he apparently just can’t delete from his calendar. He truly hopes Harry is alright. If he’s alright then this can just go away finally.

“Well, aren’t ya having a melancholy moment?” a voice says behind him, completely interrupting his thoughts. The voice has correctly identified him as the real Spider-Man. It’s a raspy voice, teetering somewhere between a really bad cold and having shouted too much at a concert. But nonetheless it is nice enough, warm but a bit cautious.

“Yeah, well. I need moments like this when they make that movie about me,” Peter says without much thinking.

“You’re right. Every movie needs a moment in the middle where the hero is at the lowest before the last hurrah.”

“How do you know this is the middle?” Peter asks, but the man doesn’t answer.

Peter smiles beneath his mask and turns to look upwards to see who he's talking to. Nothing should surprise him anymore, but somehow, he didn’t at all expect a huge beefy man in a red and black costume standing behind him. The man sits next to him on the ground without saying anything. He has a big bulky belt on his hip, two katanas strapped to his back and his suit has some holes in it. His skin isn’t visible below, having been masked by dark red dried up blood. He smells bad, but the wind blows his smell away from Peter.

Peter lays his head against his arms again, his face turned towards the stranger.

“I don’t know you,” he says.

“I know you,” the man rasps, “Would you believe that this is the third time we’ve met?”

“I think I’d remember,” Peter says. This isn’t the weirdest person he’s run into in New York. And, as bad as it feels to admit, he really would like someone to talk with, no matter how bonkers they are.

“Well, not in this draft, but in the previous ones.”

“I see,” Peter says. Blinking his eyes, full well knowing that the mask on his face looks more than emotionless.

“This is very different from the others.”

“How come?”

“I dunno. We have a very selective knowledge about things,” the man admits and laughs a bit. “I think the setting is different.”

“Is this like a parallel world thing or something?”

“Not exactly, but you could look at it that way.”

“How was I different in those other worlds?”

“I dunno” he says again. He pauses to think and then says: “How old are you in this one?”

“25.” The man looks surprised by that, but doesn’t press it.

“You’re not suicidal in this one, are ya?”

Peter thinks that that is a very forward thing to ask someone you just met. He isn’t. At least he doesn’t think he is, not actively at least. So, he says:

“As much as a vigilante hero who regularly puts himself in harm’s way can be.”

The man nods, clearly thinking about something. He’s weird, Peter thinks. But maybe that’s a welcome change. Peter doesn’t really often talk so frankly about, well, anything really. Not at least after he ruined whatever kind of relationship he and MJ had. Not to mention Harry.

“Are you?” Peter asks back.

“As much as someone who can’t die can be.”

“Really? You can’t die?”

“Yeah. I’m so lucky like that,” the man says, laughing. Peter laughs a bit too with him, but it doesn’t feel like comedy-fun-time laughing.

“So, you obviously know who I am-” Peter starts but can’t finish before the man interrupts him.

“Oh, yeah, right! I’m Deadpool,” the man introduces himself, perking up, “I’m a very big fan of yours, Mr. Spider.”

Peter smiles. It’s probably the first genuine smile he has had in weeks.

“Mister Pool,” he laughs, and offers his hand to Deadpool, who instead of shaking it, gives it a gentle kiss. Peter smirks privately to himself. What a weird man, indeed.

“As far as our first meetings go, this has been the most pleasant… I think,” Deadpool says when he lets go of Peter’s hand. Fleetingly Peter feels sad that they aren’t touching anymore, but that feeling gets soon replaced with irritation about being so touch starved that someone like this Deadpool guy can make him feel like that the first time they touch. He needs to get some and soon.

“I always aim to please,” Peter says back and immediately hates himself a bit more.

“As do I,” Dead pool says and winks at him.

“I think I should get going,” Peter says, “The rain…”

Deadpool gets up first, and offers Peter a hand to help him get up, but Peter doesn’t take it. His suit is all wet, and the rain is finally starting to seep into his skin. His legs feel stiff from sitting so long on the cold ground. Deadpool is awkwardly close, and Peter takes a step back.

“If this isn’t our only time meeting for the first time, I probably can expect to see you around?”

“Most likely,” Deadpool says and shrugs nonchalantly. “I hope to, at least, it’d be pretty bad slash fiction otherwise” he adds nonchalantly.

“What?”

“Hmh?”

“See you around then…” Peter says, looking around for a tall enough building to shoot his web string to. He takes a few running steps towards the closest one and jumps high in the air to fling himself into motion. He yelps another goodbye to Deadpool and disappears soon behind the city’s lights.

Deadpool stays bound to the ground. Alas, his superhuman abilities don’t allow him to properly follow Spider-Man, sadly. But the view is pretty good from down here, too. He’s younger than he had thought, but still closer to his thirties than teenage years. That means he must have started in his teens…

He’s also a lot sexier in person than in photos, Deadpool thinks. That spandex leaves so very little for imagination. **We’ll see what this will turn into** , a voice says quietly in Deadpool’s head. Something fun I hope, Deadpool answers back. Sexy, at the very least, a second voice adds. They’re being very nice for once, Deadpool thinks, but didn’t they all want to tap that ass.


	2. take me home

“Can you edit the photos, and make sure I don’t look fat in them?” the bride asks.They’re in Central Park, taking engagement photos. It’s very early in the morning, the sun filters through the tree branches and leaves, making beautiful light puddles on the ground. The, mostly, happy couple bathe in the light. These photos should turn out very well.

“Don’t worry, I can’t take an unflattering photo of someone so beautiful,” Peter says. The groom gives a warning look at Peter that gets caught on camera. He couldn’t care less if the man thought he was hitting on his soon to be wife. It is too early in the morning for someone to be jealous of him. He just needed this photoshoot to go well. If it goes well, that means more customers and that means not counting pennies to afford food and rent.

Damn New York for having so many freelance photographers.

And guess damn Peter for not putting that chemistry diploma into use.

Peter tries to make the couple laugh to take some photos of them looking like this isn’t staged photoshoot, but only the bride laughs at his joke. The groom lets out a forced chuckle. It’s not good.

“Hey, let’s take a small brake,” Peter suggests. He takes the man to the side, as the bride checks her lipstick on her phone’s front camera.

“Try to relax a bit. Have some fun.”

“Stop hitting on her.” Peter’s taken aback. Sure, he had noticed that the guy didn’t like him particularly, but he hadn’t been even trying to hit on his bride.

“I’m not. I’m trying to make you guys more relaxed and natural looking.”

“She’s mine,” the man counters.

“I know… I’m taking your engagement photos…” Peter answers slowly. Why on earth did he choose to spend his time on entertaining idiots like this?

“So we’re in agreement?”

Peter stared at the man. Agree on what? That she’s marrying him instead of Peter?

“Yeah, sure,” he says. Whatever, just leave a good review, he adds in his mind.

Rest of the photoshoot goes more or less worse. The broom barely smiles and in most of the photos he’s sulking and staring right into the camera. Peter hates him. The bride is nice. Why is she marrying such an ass?

Guess love really can be blind…

“You’ll get the photos in two weeks time,” Peter says in the sunniest voice he can muster after the shoot is done. He mostly directs it towards the bride, but flashes a warm smile to the man, too.

“Two weeks?” the guy says annoyed, “Can’t we get them sooner? We want to send them out to family.”

The bride gives an apologetic smile to Peter, but asks the same thing. Surely they could get in by next week?

Honestly why write anything on the website or in emails, if people really can’t read. “I’m sorry, the earliest I can get it to you is in two weeks. I have a lot of other photos to edit.” He really doesn’t. The man looks almost angry, so Peter adds: “I promise to send them as soon as I can, but it probably will be two weeks.”

The man rolls his eyes, as if Peter can’t see him at all. The bride bites the inside of her cheek but nods understandingly.

The bag containing the camera bites into Peter’s shoulder as he’s walking towards the closest library. Fucking guy. Hopefully Peter took enough photos, so the stupid couple won’t end up with a bunch of photos the groom metaphorically pissing all over the place trying to mark his territory and his woman. She wasn’t even Peter’s type.

He really just wants a good fuck with someone who can take care of him, and be gone by the morning. Or stick around… that’s an option, too.

The library is full of people. As per usual. Even this early in the morning.

St. Agnes Library has warm, cream colored walls and brown wooden floors. It’s one of Peter’s favorite places. Mostly because he can spend as much time as he wants in there, and no one asks him to pay for anything. There are small elementary school kids on a field trip. They have overrun the kids’ section, pulling out all kinds of colorful books. It makes Peter feel warm inside. But also really old. He can remember when he was that small. When Uncle Ben would read to him out loud books they had borrowed together with Aunt May from their closest library.

Peter walks past the kids and their teacher, and finds himself some free table space. He pulls out his laptop in order to do some photo editing, but then ends up only kind of looking at the screen. The laptop is old, and Peter dreads the day he has to come up with the money to buy a new one. He’s so tired. He pulls his phone out after a good while of idly editing photos. It rings almost immediately as he takes it into his hand and drops it to the floor in surprise.

Peter dives to the floor to fish the phone from under the table. Each ring sends out ripples of embarrassment, he’s fully aware that you’re not supposed to make a lot of noise and bother others in libraries. As soon as he gets the phone back into his hand, he slides to decline the call.

“Call back soon,” he writes to MJ before she calls again.

Peter packs all his stuff back into his shoulder bag. Somehow they don’t fit in anymore, and the bag won’t close properly. He gives up, and walks outside the library with the bag half open.

“Hi!” Peter greets MJ on the phone. He’s just in front of St. Agnes Library’s front doors. The kids he saw earlier walk past him in a neat queue, holding their queue buddy’s hand with one hand and the book they’ve chosen in the other.

“Hi,” MJ greets back.

“So what did you want?”

“You haven’t read my messages?”

“Uhh, I can’t say that I have,” Peter lies.

“I went to see Harry yesterday.” Her tone is almost accusatory. Peter had just flat out ignored her texts when she had demanded he’d come with. Peter walks to lean against the building’s side and suppresses a sigh. The kids disappear behind a corner. The street feels almost empty.

“How is he?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I didn’t see him.”

“He didn’t let you in?”

“That, or he really wasn’t home,” MJ says, she sounds genuinely worried, “He’s not answering any of my texts or calls.”

“What did his butler or whatever say?”

“That he isn’t home.”

Peter hums thoughtfully. What did MJ want him to do? Hadn’t he made it very clear that he nor Harry wanted to see each other?

“Could you try? If he’d let you in?”

“MJ,” Peter starts, but doesn’t know how to continue. He’s afraid that this whole Harry business will destroy the last of his relationships. He groans under his breath, and hits the back of his head against the wall accidentally. A hollow tud runs through his head. “I-I’ll see what I can do. OK?”

“Thank you. This really means a lot to me,” MJ says, “I know your friendship is kinda strained,” she adds but doesn’t sound apologetic at all.

“Yeah, well...”

“I’ll try to see if I can catch him today.”

“Godspeed,” Peter says. Hopefully she does. Then Peter doesn’t have to.

“Thanks.” She sounds annoyed, but so is Peter.

“I have to go now.”

“Bye then,” MJ says, and the call clicks closed before Peter can say his goodbyes.

Fucking Harry. Why did everything in his life somehow dance around him?

* * *

It’s as if New York’s criminal side had fallen asleep. Nothing at all was happening. Peter didn’t even run into a single acquaintance, even the old granny close-ish to his apartment hadn’t had anything to complain about. Usually she had something to say about the kids next door or some drunks that liked to stop by a bar underneath her apartment. Today: Nothing. All is well. Apparently.

But, if the past is any indication, something definitely is waiting behind the horizon. Peter just knows it. Feels it in his bones. It tingles uncomfortably under his skin.

Peter swings himself on top of a building that is considerably shorter than the buildings that surround it. Standing on it he feels like the taller buildings are somehow hiding something behind themselves, and they might at any minute just jump him and bury him under.

He feels incredibly alone.

It’s time to socialise. Peter decides. Spider-Man isn’t needed today. Clearly. And if he seriously gets creeped out by _tall buildings _that New York is famously full of… Maybe it is a good time to call it a night.__

____

Peter bee lines home. Nothing catches his eye on the road. And maybe he doesn’t want it to. He couldn’t remember the last time he had taken a night off. When he gets home he stuffs his suit and everything in a box underneath his bed. Normally he’d just leave everything kind of all over the place. But today, hopefully, he’d get some company. He chooses the nicest clothes he owns, which by any standards aren’t even that nice, and heads out.

____

Choosing between bars and nightclubs is always hard for Peter. He never liked going out that much. It’s expensive and most of the time the people he runs into are off putting and uninteresting. Peter pushes his bad club experiences to the back of his mind and shakes the ominous prickling under his skin off. He decides that he will meet someone hot today and have fun.

____

It’s colder out than he anticipated. He always forgets that the suit regulates his temperature. The wind hits him hard in the face as he turns the corner, and his jacket opens more in the wind, letting the cold air hug his torso tighter. Decision making becomes much easier. Peter doesn’t want to walk any further in the cold night, and so goes to the closest place he knows.

____

Velvet vibes is mostly a lesbian bar, but they let everyone in. The entrance fee isn’t too high either. It’s not crowded, because it’s not even close to the weekend. But there are some people. The music is loud and unfamiliar to Peter. The people, mostly women, sway more or less with the beat of the music. Reaching for others with their hands, and catching sweet plump lips with open wet mouths.

____

Peter walks further into the bar. The music fades into the background, even though the volume stays just the same. The air is thicker back here. It embraces him fully.

____

“Whatever is cheapest, please,” Peter says, leaning across the counter.

____

The bartender looks forgettable. And they are. Peter can barely remember how they looked like, when he turns around to look back at the tables and the dancefloor with the drink in his hand. It’s been a long while since he last was here.

____

The last time must have been with Gwen…

____

Peter shakes his head. As if to shake out the thought. He brings the bottle’s lips against his, and drinks.

____

The taste of alcohol surprises him. This isn’t even strong, and the taste is overwhelming. There used to be a time when he couldn’t taste the bitter alcohol in even stronger drinks. Perhaps this is a good thing, Peter thinks, then again… Where have his last years disappeared? Has he lived at all?

____

“You’re too young to look so gloomy,” a thick accent says.

____

“Why do people insist on interrupting my dramatic moments?” Peter says and turns to look who just had spoken.

____

“You look like you wear your heart out on your sleeve.” The speaker is an older woman. Fat, and soft looking. She has very short curly hair and big stomping boots and a leather jacket to match. Her skin turns bright pink and yellow in time with the dance floor’s lights. Her eyes are big, deep, deep dark brown. Somehow familiar. Peter examines his own hands. The colorful lights don’t look half as nice on his pale skin.

____

“You wouldn’t know,” Peter says.

____

“Well, I can tell something is wrong,” she says, and Peter can smell drunkenness in her breath, “What would you otherwise do here, drinking on a Wednesday?”

____

“Aren’t you here too?”

____

“So I am!” she laughs, and clinks her newly ordered beer against the one in Peter’s hands and takes a big drink from it.

____

Peter looks at her from the corner of his eye. She returns to wherever she came from with wobbly steps without saying another word. Peter downs his drink, and orders another one. This is not a cheap way to get drunk. The flashing lights strain his eyes and make them hurt. He turns his back to the lights, leaning heavily on the counter. The bartender hovers close by, waiting to supply more and more and more drinks…

____

The taste of alcohol soon disappears again under sugar and bubbles. The pink and yellow light starts reminding Peter of raspberries and lemons. The idea of dancing suddenly doesn’t seem too bad, and he makes his way in the middle of the floor.

____

Time passes only with flashes. Yellow. Pink. Yellow. Pink.

____

Someone grabs his arms and drapes them over their hips. They feel warm and real under his hands. They bring themselves closer to him and Peter can smell an unfamiliar, but not too bad, floral scent. A body presses against him and Peter tries to feel who it is, but they’re not like anyone he’s ever been with. They seem to only form out of separate body parts. Silk-like hair. Teeth. A hand. Big eyes, so close it looks like there are more than two. The color of which change with the lights. Breasts pressed against his chest.

____

They kiss, and Peter feels warm all over. He feels like he is someone else completely. It’s a welcome change.

____

The world seems hazy and unfocused. Everything is funny.

____

The hands disappear from caressing him, and Peter can’t find them anymore. He stumbles across the whole bar, but can’t find who he’s looking for, not even completely sure how they look like but absolutely certain of how they taste.

____

Peter finds himself sitting in a bathroom stall. He thinks this is the women’s bathroom, but he can’t remember what kind of a sign the door he had walked in from had.

____

He pulls out his phone and stares at it with unfocused eyes. There are texts from MJ.

____

Why not from anyone else? Couldn’t the idiot groom text him instead? It would be more fun fighting about the photos than about Harry.

____

Why, why did Harry deserve MJ’s unrelenting support and pity. Hadn’t Peter, too, lost something? Wasn’t it the anniversary of the death of his innocence soon, as well? What had she even written to him? He opens the chat, but can’t make sense fast enough of the little letters on the phone’s screen before he stuffs the phone back into his pocket.

____

The streets of New York are colder than earlier in the night. Peter pulls his jacket closed tight with his hands, but the cold gets in no matter what. His gaze jumps from the other side of the street to his shoes to the tallest corner of a neighbouring apartment building. A dark red spot catches his eye and he stops dead on his feet. It’s a familiar character, hunkering next to a window on the fire escape. He’s almost unnoticeable, keeping in the shadow the alleyway is draped in.

____

Peter is startled himself, when he sticks his hands into his mouth and produces a sharp, loud whistle. The man turns sharply towards him.

____

“It’s illegal,” Peter yells up towards Deadpool, “to break and enter!”

____

Deadpool comes closer to the fire escape’s railing and peers down at Peter.

____

“Whatcha gonna do about it?” he throws back.

____

Peter’s brain moves slowly. He misses the warm embrace of the disappeared stranger, and suddenly feels more alone than he has ever before. He feels like the loneliness is forever bonded to his very being. A knot forms to the back of his throat and it’s impossible to swallow it down.

____

“Take me home.”

____

“Sorry, I can’t hear you,” Deadpool says, leaning a bit more down.

____

“Take me home!” Peter yells louder. Maybe too loud, he can’t tell.

____

“Take me home,” Peter repeats to himself and wraps his hand around his jacket tighter. Wish Aunt May was here.

____

“Wait there.”

____

Deadpool comes down the fire escape, and stands a respectable distance away from Peter. Way further away than he did from Spider-Man. Peter feels a desperate feeling bubble through his stomach.

____

“I want to go home,” he says.

____

“And where would that be?” Deadpool asks.

____

Peter squeezes Deadpool’s waist. The motorbike underneath them purrs with a deep cadence. Peter imagines it to be a living tiger running through the nightly traffic of New York. The neon lights, raspberries and lemons, fly past them and become a glittering soup in Peter’s eyes. Deadpool feels solid and warm in his arms. Peter presses his cheek against his back and feels his eyelids becoming more and more heavy. His head starts to droop. Deadpool is so warm. Almost unnaturally warm. Hot even, like fever.

____

“Stay awake,” Deadpool says, and Peter feels his back vibrate as he speaks. How relaxing, he thinks. He could almost fall asleep here…

____

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oooh, where is Wade taking him? Hmmmm... (there is an obvious clue in there, can you find it :P )
> 
> If you enjoyed leave kudos and a comment! Ya'll have no idea how much those mean to me! :)  
> Thank you for the two people who left nice comments on the first chapter!!
> 
> You don't have to wait too long for the 3rd chapter. It's all ready to go, I'm just dragging my feet because I have to re-edit them a lot when I upload them on here. The formatting for whatever reason always kinda messes up. The start is kinda slow, but I'm just setting up the story, it'll get more fast paced soon ^-^


	3. dodging obligations

Peter wakes up slowly. The covers feel soft against his bare chest. It lays heavy over him. Heavier than he’s used to.

The smell, too.

Peter blinks his eyes open. The light swimming in from the half open window hurts his eyes and his mouth tastes sticky and dry. He pushes the covers off of his chest and discovers he’s still wearing his jeans. The fly has been opened, but apparently whoever tried to undress him, probably Peter himself, didn’t finish the job. His shirt has been draped nicely over the chair. This is his childhood bedroom. He’s at Aunt May’s. How did he end up here?

Peter moves to sit up, but immediately aborts the mission as he becomes aware of a skull cracking headache. Peter pushes his head back against the pillow and lays there for a long time, staring at the ceiling. This is what he used to look at as a teenager. The room has barely changed. It’s missing some furniture that he took with him when he moved to his own apartment, but the bed, posters, books, everything is his old stuff. Sitting here, untouched.

Somehow the walls seem taller and the room, well, not emptier, but it’s like something that shouldn’t even exist anymore. A different Peter used to live here. Not him.

What time did he come here? How did he end up here? Aunt May lives on the other side of the city from Peter. He can barely remember anything after he started dancing last night. Just moments, here and there. He remembers laughing a lot. And then not laughing and trying to swallow away a cry. He remembers kissing someone with long hair. And hugging someone very warm. Some memories feel like distant dreams, enveloped in looseness and a heavy gaze that wanders.

Peter shuts his eyes tightly and massages his temples, it’s almost impossible to know what was real and what he just imagined.

His head hurts and he wants nothing more than to brush his teeth and drink a glass of water.

There’s a knock on the door, and Aunt May peeks in.

“Are you awake, Peter?” she asks.

Peter doesn’t feel like talking and grunts in answer.

“How are you feeling?” She sits on the bed and pats Peter’s leg.

Another grunt.

“I’ll make you breakfast, if you come downstairs,” she says. It’s been a while since Peter last saw Aunt May. She looks just the same as before. She’s small. Soft skin that seems to only get thinner as she grows older, it’s still warmer in tone than Peter’s pale skin. Her hair has been dyed brown, but her roots reveal that all of her hair has gone gray a long, long time ago. She used to dye it red, but had moved to chocolate brown a year or two ago. Her face has stayed just the same. Same green eyes and kind lips. They’re not blood related, but people keep telling Peter that they have the same eyes, even though his are brown and not green.

“You gave me such a fright when you came last night,” she laughs in a motherly way, “I woke up and thought someone had broken in. And when I got downstairs there you were with your friend.”

“Friend?” Peter croaks out.

“One of those suited fellows you run with,” she says, “This wasn’t that your Spider-Man, though.”

Peter racks his brain trying to remember who the fuck he had run into last night.

“Strange man, he was.”

“Did you catch his name?” Peter asks.

“No… No, I didn’t. I don’t think he gave me his name. I was quite taken aback with him. I mean, it’s one thing to have you come over unannounced at four in the morning, but quite another to have a big masked man with guns come over.”

“He had a gun?” Peter says in a raised voice that hurts his head.

“Yes, in the holsters. Didn’t you notice?”

Guess Peter hadn’t.. He had been busy noticing different things. Like… Like being drunk.

So, Deadpool had taken him home, or rather to Aunt May’s.

“Are you doing okay, Peter?” Aunt May asks. She looks genuinely worried, and Peter feels ashamed that he keeps her so far off from himself.

“My head hurts.”

“Come downstairs,” she says and gets up herself. “I still have some of your old shirts if you’d rather wear something warmer.” She nods towards the closet.

Aunt May exits with quiet steps, leaving the door ajar. Peter gets up slowly, cursing his headache. It throbs against his skull and behind his eyes. He doesn’t think last night really was worth feeling like this. But at least he got out.

He can’t decide if he should be embarrassed that he came to Aunt May in the middle of the night and got a lift from a guy he had only met once before, and not even as Peter but as Spider-Man. How had he even managed to run into Deadpool? New York is so big, running randomly into the same guy in two very different parts of the city in this short of a timespan is very peculiar. Maybe they somehow are meant to run into each other?

Or the guy is stalking him.

Peter’s head hurts and his thoughts feel like fat fish slowly swimming around. That doesn’t make any sense… Deadpool doesn’t know that he’s Spider-Man. Right? Fuck, if he could only remember what exactly happened last night.

Peter sits on the edge of the bed, feet pressed firmly on the cool floor. Just a coincidence, he decides.

The old sweatshirt he tries on is too small. It’s uncomfortably tight across his biceps and chest. He puts on the T-shirt he had worn yesterday. There’s something spilled on the front of it, but maybe Peter doesn’t deserve the dignity of clean clothes. He makes his way slowly to downstairs, catching the smell of bacon frying half way.

“So who was it?” Aunt May asks as soon as Peter sits down.

“I think it was Deadpool,” Peter feels awkward saying the name, “But I don’t know him that well.”

“You know him through Spider-Man?”

“Uhh, yeah, kinda.” Peter drinks the glass of water down in one sitting, and gets up to get more. She drops a multivitamin to his hand. “You don’t happen to have an extra toothbrush for me?”

Aunt May shakes her head. She takes out a plate, she still has the same set as she did when Peter was small. The plates are all scratched up and on their last legs. Aunt May plops the bacon and eggs on the plate and places it in front of Peter on the table. She sits across from him. The table, and the kitchen, too, is cramped, having old magazines and some vegetable plants that Aunt May had grown herself scattered on every spot where there is any free tablespace. She doesn’t eat anything herself, probably having had breakfast already. She crosses her hands over the table and looks closely at Peter.

Peter can feel shame burn up his cheeks and ears, but tries to pay no mind and eats his breakfast like a good boy. Let’s not talk about why he’s here.

“So… How’s it going with MJ?” she asks.

“It’s going.”

“Not so well, then?” She sips her tea and looks empathetic.

“Yeah well. You know how it is.”

“It’s a shame really… She was so nice. You would have had such cute little babies.”

“May!” Peter stares at his eggs. God, could she stop with the grandchildren? Why was it always about babies with everyone, MJ, Aunt May…

“Oh, I’m just pulling your leg,” she laughs, but Peter can’t decide if she’s being honest or not. She had always liked to talk a lot about Peter having kids. Peter isn’t so sure about the whole thing. What if his powers are heritable…? Besides there isn’t even anyone to have kids with anymore, least of all MJ.

“What about that, your Spider-Man?” she asks after a moment of silence. Her question is unsure, as if she’s testing the waters, “Is he, umm, nice?”

“Are you seriously asking me if I’m dating Spider-Man?” Why isn’t this the first time someone had implied this?

“Well… You seem to spend a lot of your time with him... or taking his photos,” she says. Peter lifts his gaze, that had up to this point been glued to his plate, to stare at Aunt May. How did he always end up in these absurd conversations? He doesn’t even know what to say.

“You know I love you very much, I don’t care who you are with. I just want you to be happy,” she says. This is the first time she has ever even addressed Peter’s sexuality. To be fair, Peter had never disclosed to her that he is, in fact, bisexual, but he had never felt the need to. Besides most of his life he had been after only one girl, so coming formally out never seemed that important. Up until now he had survived without ever having to sit through this awkward _love is love_ conversation. And he doesn’t plan to now, either. Peter can’t really wrap his head around the idea that Aunt May seems to really think that he could be dating Spider-Man. Though, guess in a way he is. It’s just a lot sadder in real life.

This whole situation doesn’t help his murderous headache at all.

“I’m not-I’m not _dating_ him,” Peter says, feeling like an idiot, “We’re just friends.”

“Oh, okay,” she says quietly.

Peter feels awkward. This whole stupid converstation is not what he needs when he has a hangover. Aunt May seems stumped, but then a smile climbs on her lips:

“That Spider-Man is quite cute though,” she says smirking and leaning closer, as if she’s saying something quite scandalous.

Peter wants to die a lot a bit. “Yeah, I guess…”

“Are you feeling any better?” she changes the topic.

“I guess a little. I’m gonna hang around a bit after finishing this, if it’s okay.”

“Oh, stay as long as you want,” Aunt May says and drinks the rest of her tea. She eyes Peter with a small smile, but Peter can see that there’s worry behind them still. “So you don’t have work today?”

Peter shakes his head, as thoughts about photos and emails he has to attend fly past his head. Nothing he can’t do at the last minute.

Aunt May’s backyard is more or less depressing. Grass never grew there, everything had been drowned into sement a long time ago. Probably even before Peter had been born. He walks slow circles in the backyard. His headache is getting a bit better, but it hurts his eyes to look at anything too closely. The outdoor furniture is still inside the small shed, waiting for the spring to turn into a warm summer.

Peter nurses his coffee cup in his hands, it feels nice and warm against his skin. It’s still steaming. Peter walks to the back of the yard. He can see some plants trying to push through the cement. He can remember how Uncle Ben had often talked about renovating the yard, but he had never gotten to it. Aunt May hadn’t either, and Peter doesn’t have the time. Though, it would be quite nice, someday, to tear out all that hard, ugly, gray rock and turn this place all nice and green.

Peter stops walking and tests if his coffee is of a drinkable temperature. He can see MJ’s childhood home from there. Not completely, the wood fence kind of obstructs his view. But that’s how they knew each other. Guess she doesn’t have as fond memories living here as Peter does. Their houses aren’t even connected and he could sometimes hear her parents screaming to each other from his bedroom.

But this place is full of fond memories for Peter. Even if they are tainted by Uncle Ben’s untimely death. Aunt May had taken good care of him.

Too bad this backyard is ugly. They really should do something about it.

Aunt May slides the backdoor open, startling Peter.

“I thought we could go to the store,” she says. She wants to buy groceries for Peter. He would want to decline, but he really doesn’t have a lot of food at home.

“Yeah.”

She walks to stand next to him and drapes an arm over his shoulder. She has to reach a bit. Even though Peter isn’t that tall, she’s still considerably shorter than him.

“I know you’ll fix things with MJ, I’m sure of it,” she says, letting her gaze fall to the same place as Peter’s.

“...Yeah.”

“Are you sure, you’re alright, Peter?” she asks, turning her face more towards him. Peter wants to look away. How could he even begin to explain, when he can barely explain it to himself.

“I’m alright, I promise.”

“It’s alright if you aren’t, Peter,” she says. He can feel her squeezing his shoulder a bit. “If you’d like to stay here for a little while, I’d really love it.”

“Thank you, but… I have work, and everything is over there…”

“Well, my doors are always open,” she smiles. Peter has a feeling she wants to say something more. Perhaps ask about why on earth had he gotten so drunk last night, or about what it was that had broken him and MJ up, or why he hadn’t brought Harry over for dinner for a long while. If he could only tell her, but the truth would probably kill her.

Aunt May drops him off with two bags full of groceries. He hasn’t had fresh salad in his fridge in, he doesn’t even remember, maybe four months? His fridge looks full and happy after he unpacks the bags. It’s almost weird opening the door and actually finding food behind it.

* * *

The night is livelier than the last one. Peter runs into all kinds of trouble; he stops an attempted robbery, helps a cat down a tree, saves a little kid running after a football from being hit by a car. He doesn’t have a lot of empty moments to dwell on anything particular. He feels only a little weak after the hangover.

MJ hasn’t texted him today. And he hasn’t read the messages she had sent him earlier, still, or he had, but he can’t remember what they had said. Probably something about Harry again. Somehow he is scared to open them.

Peter stops at a small corner store to buy a water bottle, but the owner insists on giving it to him for free. Spider-Man isn’t one to decline free food or drinks, so he takes it. He swings to higher ground to peer down at the streets as he takes a few drinks. He often gets a bit dehydrated when patrolling, the suit doesn’t have big enough pockets or anything to carry water bottles around in. He should think about incorporating a backpack to his suit… But then he wouldn’t look so sleek. Ah, the troubles he has to face…

If all of his problems were like this.

Peter fishes out his phone and finally reads the texts MJ had sent him.

“I still can’t find Harry.”

“Talked to his other friends and they haven’t seen him either.”

“I think he might be in trouble. I’m really worried.”

“Could you please check on him??”

Why is she so obsessed about Harry all of a sudden? Peter can’t remember her caring so much about him before. Besides, isn’t she an investigative journalist? Couldn’t she break into his apartment instead of him?

“I’ll check on him tomorrow,” Peter writes to her, “Have you heard of him today?”

MJ answers almost immediately:

“No, he’s still missing. Could you check on him today?”

Peter sighs. He doesn’t want to. But he should. It’s what Spider-Man would do, right?

Harry’s home is on the other side of the city from Peter, in Midtown. Peter considers taking the underground there, but decides to swing there instead. He’s in no particular hurry to get there.

The closer he gets the gloomier the city seems to become. Peter glances at the sky, but there are no rain clouds gathering. The sun is starting to set slowly, coloring the white clouds soft pink and orange. The windows Peter flies past reflect a picture of him, bathing in the soft light. It seems wrong somehow. Peter doesn’t really want to go. He doesn’t even have a change of clothes nearby, and he most definitely can’t just pop into Harry’s apartment in this get-up.

He doesn’t _have to_ go. But he should. Right? To at least get MJ off his ass. So this whole Harry thing could go away, and he could focus on not dying of hunger and fixing things with MJ.

His stomach hurts.

There should be a stash of clothes somewhere here, Peter thinks, as he reaches the upper West corner of Central Park. It’s one of his older stashes that doesn’t have a spider-tracer on it, so it’s much harder to locate. Peter stops crouched on a building’s corner, and looks around trying to remember where he had hid the backpack. It is somewhere around here. Peter scratches the back of his neck, trying to think back the last time he had changed clothes around this part of the city.

Before Peter can remember the stash’s location he hears a gunshot, echoing from somewhere on his left side. The bullet wasn’t aimed for him, that he knows, but it seems that the gun was fired close by.

A second one rings out, and Peter changes his destination to the direction of the sound. He swings himself into the air, and moves towards the source as fast as he can. He soon spots where the action is; on a rooftop, approximately ten to eleven buildings from where he previously had been.

“Stop fucking shooting at me, I can’t get a clear shot,” a hoarse voice yells. Peter can see from far away that it’s a familiar character.

Deadpool is crouched behind some boxes, there are four men on the other side of the roof. The bangs echo around and back from the surrounding buildings. Deadpool stands up to take a shot at one of the men, but doesn’t hit him. If Peter sees correctly, a bullet hits Deadpool’s upper arm.

Peter lands next to Deadpool, who has ducked back to hide behind the boxes, holding his arm.

“Are you okay?” Peter asks, Deadpool seems started by his sudden presence.

“Oh, hi Spidey!” he says, in unexpected delight in his voice. As if he just hadn’t been shot. He squeezes his left bicep and Peter can see blood trickling from between his gloved fingers. Deadpool notices Peter staring at his arm.

“Oh, don’t worry, it’ll heal right up.” And as on cue he releases his grip on his arm. It’s still bloody, and there’s so much fresh blood still streaming on Deadpool’s arm that Peter can’t really tell if the wound is healed or not, until he sees how the bullet previously buried in Deadpool’s muscles pops out. It hits the roof, and rolls away. It’s disgusting, but kind of cool. Wish he had such fast healing abilities. He still has a faint scar on his side from where that bullet graced him.

“Anyway… gunmen,” Deadpool says, and peeks out from behind the boxes.

“Right.”

Peter shoots a webstring to the neighbouring building, and swings himself in a pretty arch to the otherside of the roof. He tackles one of the men before they even register that he has moved. The three remaining men all turn towards Peter at first, until they realize that they have turned their backs towards Deadpool, who shoots one of them, hitting him in the upper leg. The man falls over, instinctively holding his leg. Peter quickly shoots a web to immobilise him. Deadpool comes running towards the two remaining men.

Peter takes on the closer one. Deadpool doesn’t shoot again, but the guy he’s running towards does. Deadpool takes a bullet to his upper shoulder, but it doesn’t seem to slow him down much, only paralyse his other arm. He throws himself at the man, taking advantage of his size.

Peter gets in a fist fight with the other man. He strips the man of his weapon and hits him hard in the stomach. The guy gets in a good blow to Peter’s jaw, that knocks his teeth together. But it doesn’t take long to upper hand him. He turns around to see Deadpool in a fist fight. He has pinned the other man under him, he hits the man repeatedly with his working hand. The other one hangs limply at his side, completely dark red. His blows are violent, each of them accentuated with a wet thump.

The man’s face starts to look unrecognisable. Peter takes a few running steps towards the two, and pushes Deadpool off the man almost gently.

“I think he’s had enough,” Peter says. The man stays on the ground, covering his bloody face with his hands. He seems to be sobbing.

“Yeah,” Deadpool says out of breath, and massages his limp arm, that seems to be regaining mobility, “Fucker shot at my newly healed arm. ‘t hurts.”

Peter thinks that if Deadpool didn’t have a mask on he’d probably spit on the guy.

Peter can hear police sirens coming closer. He exchanges looks with Deadpool, and then they’re both leaving the scene as fast as possible. The police have a variable relationship with vigilantes and at the moment it is not favourable.

Peter doesn’t think Deadpool follows him, mostly because he doesn’t think he can keep up with his swinging speed. But he’s proven wrong, when he stops on a roof, closeby to where he thinks his lost clothes might be. A grappling hook flies onto the roof, and hooks on the edge. Deadpool hoists himself up, it looks kind of cumbersome, and he’s clearly still favoring the other arm.

“Hello?” Peter says. He didn’t expect to keep hanging with the man right after that whole thing.

“Hi!” Deadpool says, as he sits heavily next to Peter, dangling his feet over the building. He tucks his hands under his thighs, and he looks almost childish. Peter bets that he has a huge grin on his face.

“How’s, um, how’s your arm?” Peter asks.

“Bit sore… But better.”

“So, you really weren’t lying about the not being able to die thing.”

Deadpool nods. He rolls his injured, or rather healed, arm to show it off.

“How does it work?”

“Oh, I dunno really. Everything just grows back.”

“Interesting…” Peter says, “What would happen if you were sliced in half, which side would grow back? Or would they, like, merge back together?”

“That doesn’t sound ominous at all,” Deadpool laughs, “Please don’t kidnap and experiment on me. I’ve had enough of that.” He turns to look at Peter, perched on the edge of the building. “Well, actually, if it were you I wouldn’t mind… Experimenting.”

Deadpool winks at him. He’s coming on strong, Peter thinks. He laughs uncomfortably, he can’t decide if he’s into the guy or not.

“Don’t worry, my apartment isn’t big enough for me to partake in such big projects,” he says anyway, and isn’t sure if Deadpool catches the flirt.

“I thought you lived in a big web,” Deadpool jokes.

“No, that’s where I eat my victims, I thought you knew this. Being my fan and all.”

“Oh, right! We-I forgot!” he laughs sweetly. Peter feels warm. He really hasn’t had a lot of fun interactions with other people in a while. Deadpool seems mostly like a fun guy. But he should still look out for him, the way he had kept hitting that man…

“Are you hungry?” Deadpool asks.

Peter considers if he is. Which is silly, because he’s always hungry.

“Yeah, but only if you’re buying.”

“Deal!” Deadpool seems almost too excited. “I know a place nearby.”

Deadpool tries to sweet talk Peter into giving him a ride swinging there, but Peter strongly declines. They’re not acquainted well enough for him to feel comfortable giving him a piggyback ride. Besides, he doesn’t want Deadpool’s (and the other man’s) still fresh blood staining his suit. They walk instead, Deadpool seems to be kind of disappointed by that, but he keeps the conversation going anyway. Peter usually doesn’t walk a lot on the streets when he’s Spider-Man, but people don’t seem too comfortable approaching him when he’s with Deadpool. Mostly, Peter thinks, because Deadpool looks horrifying with all the clearly fresh blood all over his costume. His weapons are on display, and he overall seems less approachable than Peter does. He doesn’t know if he’d approach Deadpool if he was a civilian.

But guess, he already had. Whatever that says about him.

Last night, when he had been too drunk to even properly remember the whole thing. Though Deadpool's costume hadn’t been bloody then, Aunt May would have mentioned that to him.

Deadpool introduces him to a Mexican restaurant he has seen before but never been in. It’s quite small, and mostly empty. It’s on a less populated side street, and kind of hard to spot with a generic name.

The owner seems to recognise Deadpool instantly, and he personally comes to take their orders. Peter orders the same thing Deadpool does, because most of the way here he had raved on and on about how amazing the chicken burritos they make here are.

As they sit at the table, facing each other Peter feels kind of weird, but doesn’t know exactly why.

And he has forgotten all about Harry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you liked this chapter! Leave kudos or a comment! :) <3 Thank you!!


	4. break and enter

Peter finally takes a good long look at Deadpool, when their meals are placed in front of them. His left arm is completely dark red. His right hand has also turned crimson from the man’s blood. There are spatters on his chest that don’t quite get lost in the red fabric. Peter isn’t sure, but he thinks that there might be a splatter or two on his eyes. He wants to almost lean in closer to take a better look. Peter would judge him, but the truth is, he has looked similar on many occasions.

Deadpool has taken off his katanas, and laid them next to him. His belt stays on, with its guns and whatever else he has in there. Bullets and stuff, probably. Money. Deadpool tries to clean some of the blood on his hand with a wet hand towel, but it doesn’t work. His hands stop slowly, and he seems to be thinking about something feverously. He mutters something under his breath that Peter doesn’t quite catch.

Deadpool looks at his hands, and the hand towel turned red in his hands, and then at his burrito placed in front of him, and then at Peter.

“I, uh, I have a skin condition. Don’t freak out,” he says, in a voice that might read as a bit insecure. It seems to dawn on him only now that eating requires one to uncover their mouth.

He pulls his gloves off, and sets them to the side. Which, yes, Peter wouldn’t want to touch his food with dirty gloves like that either. Peter stares at his hands impolitely, knowing that Deadpool can’t accurately tell what he’s really looking at with the mask on. He tucks his own gloves off as well. His own hands look almost untouched when compared to Deadpool’s.

“It’s alright,” Peter says. Deadpool’s skin on his hands is rough looking. It has a red tint, and most of it is covered in scar tissue. It looks like it hurts. A lot. Is it just on his hands? Or all over? Peter feels kind of awkward. Should he ask about the condition? Deadpool had brought it up himself. But it would probably be ill-mannered to ask. Yeah, Peter decides, Deadpool can explain it to him if he wants, but he’s not gonna ask about it.

Peter’s question about whether the skin problem is only contained to his hands is answered, when Deadpool tucks his mask half way off. His whole chin, lips and what is visible of his neck is covered in scar tissue. It’s not necessarily bad looking, but it does look aching.

“Soo,” Peter starts, changing the subject, “Who were those guys?” He rolls his mask off his mouth, and finally gets a good whiff of the burrito. It smells mouth wateringly good, and his stomach growls in anticipation.

“Uh,” Deadpool says smartly, and Peter isn’t sure if he’s answering his question or staring at his mouth. It occurs to him that a burrito is semi-phallic shaped. He makes sure to take a bite that hopefully reminds Deadpool that he has teeth.

“Yeah?”

“Uh, yeah, they were… guys.” Deadpool says absently before biting into his food, he shakes his free hand dismissively, “Connected with a group I’m investigating at the moment…You sound different with your mask off,” he remarks, trying to shift the subject.

“What kind of group?” Peter says, ignoring the other half.

“A criminal kind, ya know, baddies, a black-and-white moralist would say.”

“Something I should get involved with?”

“Oh, I’d love that,” Deadpool says but doesn’t elaborate. He smiles. His mouth is still full but somehow the smile still comes out as endearing. “Though, I’m not gonna share my paycheck with you. You’re gonna have to do it pro-bono.”

“You’re getting paid?”

“Oh, yeah. Tons.”

“By who?” Peter asks, sometimes he wishes he’d get paid, too.

“By a guy, don’t worry your pretty little head with it.”

Peter doesn’t say anything to that. That’s kind of suspicious, no? He takes a sip from his drink, and watches Deadpool take two big bites out of his burrito. He reminds him of a squirrel stuffing its mouth with nuts.

Now, why did he have to think about nuts? Peter turns his gaze from Deadpool to the burrito in his hands. Is this guy even his type? Or is he just lonely enough to be interested?

Before Peter can continue that line of thinking, Deadpool starts talking again:

“So, you’re from Queens, right?”

“I’m sorry, _what_?!” Peter says, almost choking on his drink.

“You have a very strong accent, you moron. Everyone can guess where you’re from,” Deadpool explains, and doesn’t even try to cover up his amusement. “And it’s right here on your fan wikia, I _told you_ , I’m your biggest fan.”

“I have an accent?!”

“We’ll, duh. Don’t we all?”

“I never realized I had an accent…“ Peter says, more to himself than to Deadpool.

“God, ya know, I’m so attracted to idiots. So far you’re hitting all my boxes. Now just tell me-”

“I think that’s enough,” Peter interrupts him. Deadpool acts dramatically offended, covering his heart with his hand, but Peter can tell he’s really not. Deadpool stuffs the rest of his burrito into his mouth, which is almost impressive, considering that there were more than three bites worth of it still left. “Okay, yeah, I’m from Queens. And you’re from… Canada?”

“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Deadpool somehow says without choking, “You win the grand prize!”

“I have to guess that the prize is sexual in nature?”

“I’m almost offended, what kind of a girl do you think I am?” Deadpool says, he has finally swallowed the last of his burrito, and turns to nurse his coke glass. He puts his gloves back on. They look crusty and uncomfortable. Peter had almost forgotten about the blood.

“Well, what is it then,” he plays along.

“Well, now I’m embarrassed to say…“ Deadpool says playfully, and Peter swears he can practically see Deadpool batting his eyelashes at him under the mask. He has a big smile painted on his face. His face, what’s visible anyway, is… well, it’s not too bad looking really, now that Peter looks at it. He has quite nice bone structure…

Anyway, Peter’s first guess had been right. He feels that he should be annoyed by Deadpool, and turned off by his shameless, and frankly bad, flirting, but it really has been too long since someone has pursued him this flagrantly. It doesn’t hurt to let him on just a little bit, he decides, Peter doesn’t _actually_ need to do anything about it.

Peter hums a laugh, and eats some more. It really is super good, Deadpool seems to have at least some sense of good taste.

“Ah, hey! I wanted to thank you,” Peter says, and he can see that Deadpool is caught off guard.

“About what?”

“I heard you gave a ride to my, uh, my friend yesterday night,” Peter explains. He feels kind of bad, that he hadn’t gotten the chance, well he doesn’t remember if he did or not, to thank Deadpool for being so nice. He stuffs the last bite into his mouth, and turns his head a bit to gauge Deadpool’s reaction.

“Oh, I didn’t know he was your friend! I don’t think I even caught his name.”

“It’s Parker,” Peter says quickly, hoping the name doesn’t stick to Deadpool’s memory, “He’s, well, kinda my friend, I’m more like his muse.” Yeah, you could say that, he does make most of his money by selling Spider-Man photos. He smiles a bit, and bites the inside of his cheek to stop from laughing. “He sells picture’s of me to magazines.”

“Oh, I know his work! I didn’t realize I had competition,” Deadpool laughs, Peter likes how much he laughs, “Though, that guy was a bit of a wreck. I haven’t seen anyone so drunk in a while, on a Wednesday too no less! Also, no self preservation instinct on that one at all, he approached me like I didn’t have these bad boys on me.” Deadpool slaps his katanas sitting next to him. “You, I understand, kinda. Him? Nuh-uh.”

“Mmhmm,” Peter hums.

“Though he was cute. You’re not into him, right?” Peter feels mortified that this has been the second time he has been asked that in the same day.

“God no.”

Deadpool raises his arms and leans a bit backwards, “Whoah, strong feelings, I sense.”

“Shut up, Yoda.”

“Bad breakup?” he asks, sympathetically, leaning closer and placing his other hand on the table, in front of Peter’s plate.

“We never even dated.” Talking about yourself in third person and explaining that you, in fact, have never had an affair with your alter ego, isn’t doing any good to his blood pressure. But, hey, at least no one seemed to think that that loser Peter Parker was Spider-Man. Just obsessed with him. That’s one way to keep a secret.

“Aww, I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” Deadpool continues in the same mocking, sympathetic voice.

Peter rolls his neck in annoyance, and pulls his mask back down. Deadpool lets out a disappointed noise.

“I think I’ve had enough of you,” Peter says, standing up. He takes his gloves from the table and puts one on. “Thanks for the food,” he continues, and pulls the other glove on as well.

As he walks past Deadpool towards the door, he runs his hand over Deadpool’s bicep, just to mess with him. By his reaction, Peter thinks he succeeds. He turns to face Deadpool as he walks out of the door, and jumps into a swing almost immediately, just to show off a bit. Deadpool gives him a little wave goodbye.

* * *

Peter gets home a few hours later. He can see from a few blocks away that the lights in his apartment are on, which is odd. Someone is in there, but they’re not visible through the window.

It’s not Aunt May, right? She has no reason to come over, they just saw each other earlier today.

Peter lands on the roof, instead of climbing through the window, like he most often does. At least he can easily find his emergency change of clothes this time. The backpack is hidden in one of the corners. He pulls out a very cheap pair of jeans, and a T-shirt he had bought on sale, and sneakers. No socks, no underwear. He stuffs his suit into the bag.

The light is pouring into the hallway from under his front door. Before he even takes his keys into his hands, he presses his ear against the door to listen if he can hear something. There is a faint sound of the tv. Peter’s eyebrows knit together.

He pushes the key into the lock. The door gets stuck sometimes, and this is one of the times. Peter jiggles the lock frustrated, until the door gives in and opens slowly into his small apartment. The air in there is a bit stuffy, and he walks in slowly. He can’t see into the living room from his front door. His spider sense has nothing to say, but he’s still on edge. Who is in here?

“Oh, hi, Peter,” MJ says from the sofa. She has practically burrowed herself inside every blanket Peter has in his apartments, which is three, and she has some rom-com movie playing on his sad excuse of a tv.

“Uhh. Hi.” Peter stops on his track and just kind of stares at MJ. She pays him no mind, and casually reaches for the remote to mute the tv. The lights from it flash on her skin. She looks very familiar, laying on his sofa like this. It’s almost uncomfortable, and Peter wants her to leave. He doesn’t want her here, and doesn’t want her to remind him of all the nights he had sat next to her, her head on his shoulder. “How are you here?”

“Oh, you gave me the key, remember?” she says. She must know how Peter is feeling, her eyes are almost ice cold. But, there is something warm in her aura, too. Something that Peter almost remembers. She smiles at him a bit, and Peter thinks he should probably smile, too, but the smile dies on his lips even before it can be born.

“I thought you gave it back…?”

“Sorry,” she laughs, but not because it’s funny.

“And, why are you here?” Peter gazes at the digital clock on the tv-stand, it flashes 3 AM in green letters. He’s dead tired, and mostly just craves some sweet dreamless sleep.

“Well I figured that we’d go pay a visit to Harry,” she says, as if it is the most obvious thing in the world.

“I’m sorry. _Now?_ ” Peter says, and drops the backpack containing his suit next to his feet on the floor.

“Yeah.”

“ _Now?!_ ”

“No better time than the present.”

“Forget it, I’m not going. Why do you want me to come anyway?” Peter asks. He walks into his little kitchen, if you could call it that, and takes a snack from his happily full fridge. MJ looks almost surprised that he has food in there. She gets in a sitting position, and she, too, looks very sleepy. Her hair is not in a ponytail, like it usually is, but hanging free. Some strands are on her face, and Peter just wants her to go away. His heart aches in cold shivers.

“Well, I'd really want you to come. And I _know_ you and Harry still care about each other, regardless of your, whatever you two have going on again. And, I _might_ need some help breaking in,” she explains, and follows Peter with her eyes as he walks from the kitchen to the bedroom and from there to stand in front of the tv, facing her.

“Isn’t breaking into places you’re not supposed to be in like your job?” Peter asks. His shadow falls on MJ, and it touching her feels too intimate. He steps to the side.

“Yeah. But it’s kinda hard to get into his place.”

“What about his butler and the other people he has working for him?”

“They go home during the night.”

“You can’t get one of them to let you in to snoop around?”

“He has surprisingly loyal employees.”

“Aha… So you need me because…?”

“Well, only one of us can scale perpendicular walls.”

A traitor smile climbs on Peter’s lips before he can stop it.

“So you want me to, what, break in through the window and let you in?” Peter’s cold heartbeats turn into familiar, warm ones. They had done a lot of stuff like this together, when, well, when they had been together.

“Yeah,” MJ confirms.

He’s already decided to agree to go, before he even says so. Why he agrees, it’s anyone’s guess.

* * *

Peter only realizes what they’re about to do when they’re standing in the elevator, riding up to Harry’s penthouse apartment. He hasn’t been there in ages. And frankly he’s feeling uneasy. He doesn’t know if Harry is there or what they’ll find inside. Peter side-eyes MJ standing next to him. She still has the same jacket she had when they dated. She actually looks just the same as before, and Peter doesn’t understand why this is only now dawning on him; She’s the same girl next door she has always been, and Peter is the same idiot he was in high school. Nothing has changed. Or well… Maybe he had.

He can’t just connect with her anymore. There must be so much stuff they want to say to each other. But instead of talking, they’re riding up the elevator to go check on a friend, who neither are that good friends with anymore anyway. He doesn’t understand why this is so important to her. He just wants them both to go away, but is, guess, too scared to let them. Maybe he doesn’t want them to, he doesn’t know.

Peter draws in a breath as if to say something, but then doesn’t. MJ glances at him, and sways on her feet awkwardly. Peter fleetingly thinks about Gwen, but then stops. There is a mirror behind them, but Peter doesn’t want to even look at it. He’s afraid of what it’ll reflect.

The elevator dings, and the doors open to the very top floor. Harry’s apartment’s door is just on the right. There is a huge window in front of them, opening up to the whole New York. The city is just as alive as it is during the day. More, even. The neon lights flash and blink, and Peter wishes he'd be in his bed instead.

“Let’s try the doorbell first,” MJ says, and presses on the bell. They wait around a while, then ring it again, and then knock on the door in case the bell is broken.

“He’s not gonna open it,” Peter says eventually. MJ turns towards him.

“You know what to do then,” she says, and seems almost excited. She hasn’t been happy around him in a while, and this is a weird situation to be so. Peter kind of nods at her, and takes the elevator a few floors down. There’s a, guess you could call it a communal balcony. It’s very nice and big with a lot of greenery and a few sofas and tables for the residents to chill and be rich at. He has sat here with Harry, and MJ, and Gwen a few times during the late evenings. But it has been years since.

The balcony is empty, and luckily for him, he’s not visible from the resident’s humongous windows, only from the hallway’s huge ones. But he’ll know if there's someone in the hallway from the motion sensor lights. No one really seems to be on the move at the ungodly hour he and MJ are.

Peter looks around just once more before he starts quietly climbing the wall. He needs to climb up four stories. Each time he gets higher, the worse idea he thinks this is. Why is he doing this again?

Right, it’s important to his _ex_. And, guess he has to keep holding onto his moral code or whatever. He’d feel bad if something he could prevent would happen to Harry.

…Not that he hadn’t already let Harry down before.

He gets to the top floor. He can see MJ clearly through the window, still ringing the doorbell and knocking on the door. Peter knocks on the window, and MJ spins around to smile at him. Her mood will definitely turn sideways if they find something bad on the other side of the door. Peter waves at her and she gives him thumbs up. He feels uneasy. The last time he had climbed these walls he had had the heavy body of Mr. Norman Osborn on his shoulders. In some ways he had never shaken him off. And now it’s weighing on him more than in a long while.

Peter climbs swiftly towards Harry’s balcony. He knows that the door there most likely won’t be locked.

And it isn’t. The door swings open perfectly quiet, and Peter steps into Harry’s living room. It looks a bit different than before, but nothing is so out of place that Peter should immediately worry about Harry’s wellbeing. He doesn’t want to stay in the apartment alone, so he walks as fast as he can towards the front door, to let MJ in.

“Hi, we didn’t order anything,” Peter says lamely when he opens the door. MJ smiles a bit and rolls her eyes, but her demeanor changes almost immediately as she peeks into the dark and silent apartment.

“Do you think he’s here?”

“I didn’t see anyone, but I don’t know.”

“Harry?” MJ calls into the apartment, and it doesn’t answer back. She steps inside, past Peter, and clicks the lights on. “Harry? Are you here?”

Peter closes the front door behind them, and turns to follow MJ, who’s making her way towards the living room and from there to Harry’s bedroom. The lights follow her throughout the apartment. She calls for Harry, and Peter does, too. Everything seems to be in its place and clean.

They get to Harry’s bedroom, the door is closed, but it doesn’t have locks. MJ opens the door, and the air that rushes out as she does so tastes sweet and thick.

“Harry?” she says, softer than before. The room is dark, the blinds have been pulled in front of the windows and the room smells lived in. Like Harry hasn’t left the room in a while. There are books and notebooks scattered all over the place, and Peter can already spot some bottles next to his bed and work table. MJ clicks the lights on, and the big pile on the bed moves. Peter can see Harry’s bewildered face pop up from under the many covers he’s buried under. Harry squints his eyes and looks confused. He looks a bit pale and has huge eye bags under his eyes, his brown hair points to every direction, but otherwise he actually looks pretty normal. He had seen Harry look exactly the same when they had been in college. For some reason this angers Peter, but he tries to swallow it down.

“Hi, Harry,” MJ says softly and unsurely. She clearly hadn’t planned this far ahead. Peter follows her further in the room meekly. He waves at Harry, who he isn’t even sure understands what’s going on.

“What-what are you guys doing here?” Harry says. His voice is soupy with sleep. “How’d you get in?”

“Uh, MJ picked the lock,” Peter lies. “Sorry about that.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s four.”

“In the evening?”

“In the morning.”

“Oh,” Harry says. He’s waking up more and more. He blinks his eyes and turns his head from MJ to Peter to MJ. “Why are you here?”

“We were worried. You haven’t answered my texts or calls in weeks, and every time I came over you weren’t home,” MJ answers.

“I’m-I’m fine,” Harry lies. Peter looks around the room. It’s a mess. He has paper and books scattered everywhere. The empty alcohol bottles and cans have been piling for a good while, he can see pill bottles on his nightstand, and Harry’s closet hangs open, showing that all the clothes in there live in nebulous piles instead of neat ones. MJ takes no shit, and says:

“We can very clearly see that you’re not.”

“Yeah,” Peter says just to say something. He doesn’t want to look at Harry too much. He feels something he can’t name very well, and he fears he might say or do something he doesn’t want to if he looks at him too long.

Harry’s eyes water and he’s clearly trying to not to cry. MJ sits on his bed and hugs him.

“Harry, you’re our friend, we want to be here for you,” she says. And somehow that angers Peter even more and he doesn’t know why. He sulks closer to the two, and offers a friendly smile to Harry, who is avoiding his eyes as well. Harry pulls MJ a bit closer and suddenly he’s crying.

“I’m sorry,” Harry sobs through the tears, “I’m so sorry, I’m just… I’m an orphan.”

Get in the fucking line, Peter thinks, and then recoils away from the thought. What was that? He’s staring at an old friend, his _best friend_ , grieving the death of his parents, and that’s the thing that runs through his mind?

He sits on the bed next to MJ as a show of remorse, and pats Harry’s shoulder, in an attempt to give him comfort. He doesn’t know if it helps him at all. Harry cries quietly in MJ’s arms, until he seems to get so tired that he’s falling asleep again. MJ lays him back gently. Peter’s hand is still on his shoulder. Harry mumbles something but Peter isn’t sure what. Harry blinks slowly until he doesn’t open his eyes anymore, and his breathing is comforting and normal. MJ looks at Peter and chews at her inner cheek.

“He’s a mess.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen him cry before.”

“He did at his dad’s funeral,” MJ reminds him, but Peter doesn’t remind her that he hadn’t been there. He feels horrible, and looking down at the sleeping body next to him somehow angers and saddens him. But he doesn’t know why. Everything would be well if Harry just wasn’t… here. If they didn’t know each other.

But now he has to witness what his hands have done, and he has to watch it sleep in some kind of hazy sadness, comforted by him.

There’s something big lodged at the back of his throat and he feels like choking. MJ tucks Harry better in the bed, and then gets up. She picks up a few bottles and goes to set them down in the kitchen. While she’s gone Peter goes to snoop around Harry’s room.

He knows Harry has a diary. He’s seen him write in it a few times.

He knows it’s wrong, but he has to know what Harry is thinking, what ke knows. Peter has been wondering for years at this point, but the right opportunity had never presented itself.

And now here it is.

It doesn’t take long to find it, it’s tucked into Harry’s nightstand, like it always has been. Peter pulls it out and glances at Harry, still sleeping. MJ hasn’t come back, Peter thinks she needs some time alone. And so he opens the diary and flips to the newest entry.

There’s not a single mention of him. Just Harry cataloging what he had found in his dad’s bedroom. Apparently he hadn’t set foot in there after Mr. Osborn had been buried. Peter’s throat gets tighter the more he reads. He remembers how he had felt after Uncle Ben had died. Had the man who shot him felt like he does now?

Harry seems fixated on the mirror that hangs in Mr. Osborn’s bedroom. Peter doesn’t know what mirror, he has never himself been in the room in the first place. It seems like a silly thing to obsess about, but Harry has written a good long paragraph about it.

Peter thumbs a few pages backwards, but there’s still barely any mention about him or Spider-Man. Just one sentence, wishing Spider-Man would disappear and how Peter is a bad person for being friends with him. It’s kind of lame almost, Harry had said more horrible things about Spider-Man and Peter himself to his face.

Peter closes the diary and places it back in its place. He turns to leave the room to check on MJ.

She sits on the sofa, facing away from Harry’s room. She looks stiff and her hands are set unnaturally on her lap. She turns to look at him when he walks next to her.

“Well… Found him,” Peter says.

“Yeah.”

“Now what?”

“I don’t know.”

Peter hums. He wants to leave. He wants to leave and never see Harry again. He’s angry at him, and angry at himself, and angry at MJ for giving Harry more support than she ever gave him. Peter can feel his emotions bubbling under his skin and he’s almost sure that if he spends yet another second in this horrible place he’ll get sick.

“I’m gonna go,” he says. He expects MJ to fight him, but she just nods and says:

“Alright. I’ll stay here. Text you later.”

“Uh. Okay, yeah. Alright.” Peter heads straight to the front door.

The moment the elevator doors close and he’s standing alone his hands start shaking and he’s seriously concerned that he’ll puke before he gets outside. Breathing is almost impossible and he can’t even stand anymore. Peter slumps to lean against the big mirror in the elevator, being careful not to catch a glimpse of himself from it.

Peter can feel his heart speeding in his chest and this is it, this is the heart attack coming to kill him that he had somehow evaded on the night Mr. Osborn had died. Peter presses his palm against his heart and closes his eyes, just waiting to fall over, but he never does. Eventually his breathing slows down and his heart keeps on pumping.

Peter opens his eyes and stares at his chest unbelievingly. The elevator doors ding open, and Peter steps out. He’s so tired that the lobby feels unreal.

When he gets home he falls on his bed without even taking off his clothes. The sleep washes over him like a big wave and drowns him into a long, dreamless sleep.


	5. sidetracked

Peter is stirred awake by his phone ringing next to his ear. He has slept on both of his arms, and they feel weak and numb as he rolls on his back and pats the bed in search for the phone. The moment he reads the name of who’s calling he springs to a sitting position and looks horrified at the clock on his nightstand.

“PARKER!” Jameson’s shout rings out immediately when he slides to accept the call, “Where in the _hell_ are you?!”

“I-”

“I very _clearly_ told you to be here at _exactly_ 10AM! Yet I don’t see your ass here,” Jameson says angrily, then it sounds like he’s pulling the phone further away from his mouth to talk to somebody else, but his voice is still so loud that it sounds like he’s speaking right to Peter, “WHAT?! You can’t call that sexual harassment! It’s an _expression!_ ”

“I’m so sorry. I’ll be right there-” Peter gets interrupted again.

“I expect to see your, uh, non-sexualised ass here in no less than 10 minutes or you’re FIRED!”

“I live 30 minutes-”

“I will FIRE you, so help me GOD!” The line clicks shut and Peter just kind of stares at his phone. This must be the hundredth time Jameson has threatened to fire him. But he could never be sure if this was the time he actually did.

It doesn’t take long for Peter to be out of the door; He’s already dressed, he just had to put on socks and grab a jacket. It’s not like Jameson will expect him to be dressed any more professionally as he already is. Which is not at all. He has his camera bag with him, where he has stuffed the photos he’s supposed to bring to Jameson. The strap of the bag digs into his shoulder. He slept in a weird position and his shoulders start to hurt from the weight of all the stuff he’s carrying with him.

Peter is so disorganized after the night that he’s halfway to the underground until he realizes that running is faster than walking. He runs the rest of the way and catches a subway train just as it’s about to depart.

He’s not too far off from the Daily Bugle when his phone rings and he stops to answer it. It’s MJ. Peter doesn’t know why he expected anything different. He slides to decline the call without much thinking. He had already given her his whole night yesterday, she could respect him enough to give him his morning. He’ll call later, Peter promises to himself out of some horribly tangled sense of responsibility.

Peter gets a tingly feeling on the back of his neck all of a sudden. The jolt runs through his whole body, and he looks around for what the source could be, but he sees nothing out of the ordinary. The street is just as full of people and cars as it should be. The building blocks are just as gray as they usually are. The advertisements and posters are just like they were the last time he had been here. Peter turns to peer at the alley way he’s stopped in front of. He glances at the other New Yorkers walking past him, but no one else seems to be sensing the same thing he is. Which is, guess, normal. He should just keep on running towards the Daily Bugle’s office, but he’s already late and he’s already stopped, might as well investigate a bit further, Peter reasons with himself. The last drops of tiredness roll off his eyes, and Peter feels weirdly energetic all of a sudden. Finally something just for him.

Peter ventures into the alleyway. It's a fairly familiar place for him, and he can’t really spot anything wrong with it, still it almost feels like he has just stepped into another world.

He keeps walking further and thinks he can hear something very faint under the roar of noise coming from the street behind him. Something almost akin to prolonged whining. When Peter finally spots the source of the sound, it’s not the action packed distraction he had hoped for, but a very easily recognisable character he keeps on running into.

It’s Deadpool, leaning heavily against a trash can. He’s hidden by the trash and cardboard boxes so that he’s practically impossible to spot from further away.

“Deadpool?” Peter asks, before he realises that Deadpool is holding something very slimy and floundering in his hands. He stops to stare at the thing that should very much be on the inside, glittering in the alleyway’s limited light. Peter’s not as awake as he had thought at the alleyway’s entrance. He thinks he should probably do something, but what exactly he doesn’t know. He feels awful and hopeless.

Deadpool turns to him almost feverously. “Hey! We know you!” Peter turns to fish the phone back out of his bag to dial for help.

“Oh, don’t bother,” Deadpool says and lifts his closest arm in an attempt to whisk the phone away from Peter’s hands, but he doesn’t come even close.

“I-What? Why not?”

“They can’t do anything I can’t do myself already.” Oh right, Peter thinks slowly, he can’t die.

“Well can I do something?” Peter asks, stuffing the phone back into his bag. Everything he does seems to happen too slow and fast at the same time. You’d think that he’d be more equipped to deal with these kinds of things, but it’s not everyday you walk into a horror scene. Though, Deadpool doesn’t seem too bothered, although he is clearly in a lot of pain. Peter looks closer at Deadpool. He’s sitting in a pool of his own blood. One of his katanas is awkwardly and probably very uncomfortably pressed against his back, the other one is lying next to him, the blade turned towards him, coated in blood. A handgun is halfway tucked back into its holster. Deadpool holds his stomach with one hand and his head hangs heavy towards Peter. His lower half is so drenched in blood that Peter can barely tell what’s really going on there. It’s probably for the better, really. A torn-up cardboard box under Deadpool’s legs soaks up some of his blood, turning deep red and wrinkly.

Deadpool’s head moves like a puppet’s as he turns to look where Peter is. “God, that looks awful, doesn’t it?” He tries to push some of his guts back inside, but fails. The sound he makes is animal-like, non-human, horrible wailing.

“Can I help?” Peter for some indescribable reason asks.

“Yeah…” Deadpool says, and he manages to maintain an almost casual like tone, yet he must know what kind of a gruesome task he’s asking Peter to perform. Peter feels cold all over, but he also thinks that whatever it takes to ease Deadpool’s suffering, he’ll do gladly.

Peter drops on his knees clumsily, his bag still digging into his shoulder. He shoves Deadpool’s hand off of his stomach, and it drops almost limply to the side. The guts feel slimy and slippery in his hands, and they squirm and move like eels out of water. He feels his stomach turning and a disgusting salty taste rises into his throat. Deadpool is horribly hot in his hands, though he doesn’t know why he expected it to be cold. A high-pitched sound rings in Peter’s ears, drowning out Deadpool’s wailing.

Somehow Peter succeeds in his quest and holds Deadpool’s stomach shut with as much strength as seems appropriate. He can finally see the clean slit running across Deadpool’s stomach. There isn’t much else to focus on than on the hellish smell of blood and the warmth of Deadpool’s skin. He’s so warm, Peter thinks. It’s almost comforting. The blood starts to feel sticky and thick on his skin.

Peter doesn’t realize that Deadpool has stopped breathing, until he takes in a huge breath. He convulses forwards as if he’s puking, but nothing comes out. Deadpool grips one of Peter’s arms surprisingly tightly and says:

“Damn, Parker, you’re so much stronger than you look,” he coughs, “please stop, I’m gonna shit myself if you press any harder.”

Peter lifts his hands off almost theatrically. He blinks a few times.

“One moment please,” he says and gets up to vomit. After he’s done, he slumps back to sit next to Deadpool in his puddle of blood.

“I’m sorry you had to stumble upon me,” Deadpool says after a while, “but thanks, for helping. I would have been laying here a lot longer if it wasn’t for you.”

“You lied. You can die. You just did,” Peter says.

“Yeah but I don’t stay dead.”

“That’s not the same as not being able to die.”

“Tomayto, tomahto,” Deadpool says playfully. He adjusts his posture a bit. Peter stares at his hands, they’re blood soaked all the way up to his elbows. It’s a terribly familiar look, Peter thinks, but no one died… Permanently at least. He turns to look at the man next to him. He can see tiny blood spatters on his white eyes. Peter feels like smiling for some reason.

“I think you owe me dinner or something.”

“Don’t people have brunch at this time of the day?”

“You owe me brunch then,” Peter corrects. He hadn’t had breakfast in the morning, and he feels even more hungry after getting sick.

Deadpool gets up, he moves a little bit stiffly, but it’s basically impossible to tell that he had just moments ago sat in agony with half of his stomach hanging out. The only clue remaining is the slit in his suit and the blood clinging to it, but that, too, is hard to spot, the red fabric of his suit disguising it impressively well, at least in the alleyway’s limited light. The smell only remains. He offers a hand to help Peter get up as well, and Peter takes it. Peter remarks that Deadpool has nice and pleasantly large hands. He feels comforted by them.

Peter looks at his clothes. His jeans have turned almost completely red, only the front of his thighs has stayed light blue. His jacket’s sleeves are red up to his elbows, and there is some blood on his stomach as well, on the spots he had wiped his hands. The bag thankfully somehow had evaded all dirt. Peter turns to look at Deadpool, who has collected all his stuff from the ground and moved to stand further away from him. He seems to whisper something very faintly to no one, Peter doesn’t quite catch what he had said.

“Uh. Do you happen to live nearby?” Peter asks, lifting his forearms towards him to show him how bloodsoaked his clothes are. He can’t possibly go to the Daily Bugle now. Jameson would probably die of a heart attack.

“I-Yeah. I have a place nearby-ish,” Deadpool says meekly, he seems so different from the Deadpool Peter had met as Spider-Man. His demeanor has shifted. “Though, are you sure you wanna come up to my place? I mean-”

“I wasn’t joking when I said you owe me brunch.”

Deadpool swallows dryly, and then rolls his shoulder back a bit. Gathering courage and whatever else. He seems almost more intimidated by Peter than Spider-Man. Which is a first, truly. No one ever seems to be intimidated by him.

“Come on, I just had my hands literally inside you, I think I’m entitled to some aftercare.”

Deadpool moves so that it looks like he’s embarrassed. Peter momentarily wonders if he’s blushing. He had meant that more as a joke, but guess it had come out a bit differently.

“Uh. Yeah. I mean of course!” Deadpool says, and it’s clear that he’s just a little bit out of breath, “Just follow me.”

Deadpool leads Peter out of the alleyway. They gather some looks from other people. He tries to signal to them that everything’s really alright, but he doesn’t think he’s being very convincing, looking like he does, following a big bloody man with visible weapons on him.

“Aha!” Deadpool exclaims as he spots a lone motorbike, parked at the side of the road. It is very clear that the bike is not Deadpool’s as he doesn’t have the key for neither the ignition nor the chains on the wheels. He pulls out surprisingly big bolt cutters, and chops the chains open with assurance that ensures Peter that this is something very normal for Deadpool. He forces the cutters into Peter’s hands and he holds onto them helplessly, more than aware that they are gathering an audience.

“What are you doing?” Peter crouches next to Deadpool, trying to hide his face from the phone cameras people are pointing at them.

“Would you rather walk?” Deadpool says, a bit insecurely, but still moving as if this is just another day. Peter glances quickly around them and decides that they’re too deep already.

“I think you're a bad influence on me.”

“I tend to be like that. I’m sorry,” Deadpool says, and finally gets the bike to roar awake, “You coming?” he asks and swings his leg over the bike. Peter drops the cutters to the ground and hops to sit behind Deadpool. He sets off before Peter can get a good secure grip of anything, so he momentarily has to use his other palm to just stick to Deadpool’s back, before he can wrap his arms around his torso. He can feel Deadpool’s heartbeat, and it’s scary to think that it hadn’t been there just a moment ago. Now it feels alive and hot.

“This is forming into a habit,” Deadpool yells into the wind. He’s driving very fast, weaving between and around the traffic on the streets. Peter doesn’t answer. He’s trying to remember the last time. The only thing that he has retained from that night is how comforting and warm, who he assumes was, Deadpool had felt in his arms. It’s still nice, Peter thinks. He doesn’t press his head against Deadpool’s back. That feels too forward, but the idea doesn’t seem too off putting to him. He’d almost like to do it again and again.

The apartment building they stop in front of isn’t anything special. The neighbourhood is probably just a bit more expensive than Peter’s. He’s a bit surprised by that. He had imagined Deadpool to be doing at least somewhat better than him financially, with him getting paid “tons” to do jobs for someone. Come to think of it, what did he exactly do? It’s starting to become more and more apparent that Deadpool is a more dark gray than light character. They had just literally stolen someone’s motorbike.

Deadpool gets off the bike, he seems to at first offer a helping hand to Peter, but then pulls it away before he can even consider grabbing it. He sits on the bike feeling conflicted, but then gets up.

“I don’t think you should steal stuff. It’s wrong,” he says as he reaches Deadpool at the front door. Deadpool jiggles his key in the lock, it seems to have the same problem Peter’s apartment door does, but it does eventually open.

Deadpool doesn’t answer him, so he continues, “Do you steal things often?”

“I’m trying to cut back,” Deadpool says, facing away from him. “Do you wanna take the elevator? It’s kinda a death trap, but it’s faster.” He slows down waiting for Peter to make the decision. Peter decides that the elevator is more convenient, and presses the call button. He turns to lean against the wall and looks at Deadpool.

“I really am trying to get better. If that makes a difference,” Deadpool says without prompting, “I’m trying to impress… someone.”

Peter gets a feeling that he might be talking about him, or well, Spider-Man. He wrinkles his eyebrows without meaning to. It’s starting to dawn on him that he doesn’t actually know a lot about Deadpool at all.

“What do you even do?” Peter asks.

“I do a lot of different things, kinda whatever, as long as I get paid,” Deadpool says, he draws on the floor with his boot. “But I’m getting more picky.”

“You have a job now?”

“Are you always this inquisitive?”

“Oh, I’m sorry… I-uh, I’m used to being around journalists. You pick up habits.”

Deadpool chuckles. The elevator doors open, and Peter follows Deadpool inside. The elevator is much smaller than the one he and MJ had ridden last night. Peter presses his hand against his face, forgetting that his hands aren’t clean. He can feel how big the eyebags under his eyes are. It wasn’t even that many hours ago that he had been at Harry’s place. In his elevator.

“I really like the photos you take,” Deadpool says. He tries to stand further away from Peter, but the small box they’re in doesn’t allow it. Peter can feel his shoulder brushing against Deadpool’s arm.

“You only say that because you like the subject I take photos of,” Peter laughs. He turns to look at Deadpool, but of course he can’t tell at all what he might be feeling under that mask.

“I like your other work, too!”

“Sure.” Peter feels good. Better than in weeks. He all of a sudden doesn’t find MJ’s excited and amused behaviour last night at all odd. He just had a horrible night and morning, and here he is, one could say, happy. Distracted, at the very least.

When they get off the elevator, Deadpool turns towards him sharply, startling him. He blocks his way off completely. Peter feels cornered, but he feels so careless that he doesn’t mind.

“I’m an idiot,” Deadpool says, “My name’s on the door.” Peter peeks at the four apartment doors behind Deadpool. Fitzpatrick, Wilson, Barajas, Cherry. Then he looks back at Deadpool and tries to guess which name is his.

“You could have just lied and said that it’s a fake name.”

“Is it too late for that now?”

“I’m afraid you already showed your hand,” Peter says, holding in a laugh.

“Fine. Fine,” Deadpool repeats to himself, “You think so?” he says, but it isn’t clear if he’s still talking to Peter. “Alright, fine. It’s not like it was a big secret to begin with. I can trust you right?”

“I mean, yeah. I won’t tell anyone.”

“You know Spidey’s real identity?”

“Uh… Yeah. And haven’t told that to anyone.”

“Then I can trust him, right?” Deadpool says, very clearly now talking to someone else.

“Hey, I mean, as much as I’d love a shower, if you don’t really want to tell me, it’s fine. I understand,” Peter says. He really does understand, though he’s dying for that shower.

“My name’s Wade Wilson.” He offers a hand at Peter.

“Peter Parker.” They shake hands.

“Love the alliteration, do ya think it’s a memory device?”

“You think our parents had such bad memory?”

“Stranger things have happened,” Wade laughs and Peter does with him. Wade turns to go open the door and let Peter in. He tastes the name in his mouth, trying it out. Wade Wilson. He glances at Wade as he holds the door open for him. It’s a very soft sounding and feeling name, but somehow it fits him perfectly.

The apartment he walks into is, well, not the picture perfect rendition of home sweet home. Though, in some ways it is quite charming and warm. It’s not the cleanest, he can see into the open plan kitchen from the entryway and already spot dirty dishes and empty cardboard pizza boxes. The bathroom door is immediately on his right, the door slightly ajar.

“Do I take my shoes off?” he asks.

“I didn’t peg you as a shoes off kinda person.”

“Well, I was more wondering about how dirty our shoes are.”

“You’re right,” Wade smiles, and sits down on the floor like a child to take his boots off. Peter toes out of his, and walks further into the apartment. It’s not big. Maybe a few square meters bigger than Peter’s.

The living room and kitchen, while dirty and very lived in, look comfortable. Wade has a real tv, from this century, and a gaming console to go with it. Next to it is a small bookcase, but there’s not a lot of books on it, the shelf space mostly taken up by decorative items and ammunition boxes. Some of them look old and untouched with a layer of dust on top. There’s a picture on the shelf. It’s of a little girl, perhaps around four or five. Maybe older, Peter has never been good at telling the age of children. The kid has long curly black hair, tied up into two high pigtails. She’s wearing a simple light pink T-shirt and a skirt. She has the biggest smile on her face, and the picture is just a touch out of focus, she seems to have moved when it was taken. She’s holding someone’s hand, but the other person is cropped out of the picture. Peter leans in a bit more. That’s Wade’s hand.

“Who’s that?” Peter asks over his shoulder.

“Huh?” Wade answers, and Peter can hear him walking closer. He reaches over Peter and grabs the picture frame. He runs his fingers over her picture, and sets it back on its place.

“That’s Ellie,” he says, almost dreamily, “I really didn’t think this through, bringing you over, huh,” he laughs awkwardly.

“Is she, uh, related to you?” Peter asks, he turns to take a better look at Wade, trying to see if he can spot any similarities between them, but it’s practically impossible, him still wearing the mask and all.

“Yeah. She’s my daughter.”

“Oh.” Peter doesn’t know how to continue. He didn’t expect Wade to be a father.

“Yeah, can you imagine? Someone so beautiful being related to me?” His voice sounds bittersweet.

“I think you’re selling yourself short.”

Wade barks out a laugh. He shakes his head as if he can’t even accept that Peter could be telling the truth.

“No but, she’s great. So smart, smarter than me.”

“Do you see her often?”

“Not that often… I feel… oh, it doesn’t matter. I come and go, I think that’s better for everyone.”

Peter doesn’t press on it, he can see that it’s a sensitive topic.

“Let me get you some clothes,” Wade says and disappears into his bedroom. Peter dares not to follow, rather he turns around to snoop more around the living room, but there’s not much else interesting. Wade’s dark gray sofa looks soft and comfortable. The furniture itself is quite cheap, but Wade has dressed it up with big pillows that look like you would sink snuggly into them if you’d lean against one, and a bright pink, fluffy blanket. Nothing really fits together, but that more or less seems to be Wade’s style.

It doesn’t take long for Wade to re-emerge from the bedroom, he has a neat little pile of clothes with him that he plops into Peter’s arms.

“There are clean, or a clean towel, in the cabinet in the bathroom,” he says.

Peter locks the door behind him. He sets the clean clothes on the toilet, and starts undressing himself. It’s actually harder than he thought it would be. He has undressed from bloody spandex many times, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that cotton and spandex have very different opinions on blood. The hardened fabric tears away at the hairs on his arms and legs.

He looks at his destroyed clothes. He could probably try and salvage them, but it seems to be more work than it’s worth. The only real thing he’s upset about is the state of his jacket. He really liked it. Now, its sleeves and front are just drenched. He doesn’t think the red color could be washed off from the white fluffy lining.

Peter gets in the shower. The water heats up slowly. It runs red across his body and into the drain. Peter feels lightheaded, but he doesn’t exactly know why. There are so many reasons for it, bad sleep habits, hunger, stress… He lets the water wash over his hair and face, and wills himself to feel better, to return to that feeling he had in the elevator with Wade.

He thinks about the mysterious man on the other side of the door. He’s… not actually that different from other people he has dated. Not even the first thief. Though, they’re not dating. And they probably shouldn’t, right?

Peter massages soap into his arms, watching the foam slowly turn to copper.

The clothes Wade had given him don’t fit him very well. But that was expected. Wade’s a lot taller and overall bigger than he is. He has to tie the sweatpants very tightly so they don’t fall off of him. The long sleeved shirt smells very nice, Peter notes as he pulls it over his head. He brings the shirt’s front against his face. The fabric has softened in use and smells very… Peter doesn’t know how to describe it well. It simply smells very good, but not like detergent, but like a human. It’s a very well loved shirt. He lets go of the fabric, and lets it drape over his skin like it wants to.

That’s the smell of Wade.

“I ordered food while you were in there,” Wade says, standing up from the sofa like a soldier surprised by his superior, when Peter walks out of the bathroom.

“Oh, what did you order?”

“I didn’t know what you like, so I ordered a bit of everything.”

“Oh. Well, thank you.” Peter walks closer to the sofa, Wade follows him with his gaze. His movements seem stiffer and more awkward than before, Peter wonders if it's because he’s wearing his clothes. He glances at himself. The sweatpants are barely holding on to his hips, and the shirt hangs exposing his collarbones. He suddenly feels very vulnerable, an awkward smile grows on his lips.

He sits down. He was right, the pillows are very soft, like pieces of clouds.

“Aren’t you gonna get cleaned up?” he asks, nodding towards Wade’s beat up and bloody suit.

“I don’t think-uh. You’d probably lose your appetite.”

“I think you’re underestimating how hungry I am,” Peter says, “But of course, whatever makes you most comfortable. Don’t you have another suit to change into?”

“Ya know, maybe I should take a shower. One of the most often used adjectives in this fic about me is _smelly_.”

“Uh, yeah. There you go then.”

When he hears the bathroom’s door’s lock click shut, Peter finally starts to realise what has happened to him during the day, and that he’s really here, in Deadpool’s apartment. He looks around just to make sure that he’s not making this up, but everything looks very real. He burrows deeper into Wade’s amazing pillows and stretches to fish out his phone from his bag.

“Hi, Jane,” he greets, when Jane picks the phone up.

“Hi, Peter!”

“Is Jameson still in the office?”

“Yeah, and foaming from the mouth as usual.”

“Could you tell him that I’m not coming in today? I, uh, run into some problems.”

“Do you really think I’m gonna walk into that lion’s den voluntarily?”

“If you just could?” Peter asks. He can feel himself settling more comfortably on the sofa. Talking with Jameson on the phone would surely kill the first comfortable moment he’s had in forever.

“Nuh-uh.”

“Please?”

“What’s in it for me?”

“Umm,” surely not money.

“I want a photoshoot,” she says.

“A photoshoot?”

“Yeah, I’m trying to get back into dating. Some good pictures wouldn’t hurt.” Peter considers her demand. It’s not too bad. At least he won’t need to talk to Jameson, but there’s no guarantee that he won't just call him anyway. And he still needs to see him later regardless.

“Eh, no. No, I don’t have the time, sorry Jane. Just connect me through to him,” he decides.

Peter waits for Jameson to pick up. He surprisingly doesn’t start yelling immediately, but starts with a polite hello.

“Hi. I, um, I actually can’t come today,” Peter says, he pulls the phone away from his ear proactively, but is surprised when he doesn’t hear yelling. He brings the phone closer, and catches the end part of Jameson’s sentence.

“…saw you get _kidnapped!_ Are you alright?!” he sounds genuinely worried, this isn’t the first time Jameson has shown that he really on some level cares about him, but Peter can’t quite understand why he’s suddenly concerned for him. Who got kidnapped? Him?

“I’m, uh. Yeah I’m alright, I’m at a friend’s right now.”

“Oh good. I was worried. You got away then?”

“I’m-um, I’ll come drop off the photos tomorrow, ok?” Peter says, practically giving himself a day off. Does he think he got kidnapped by Wade? Someone from the office then probably had seen them steal that motorcycle. Peter pinches his eyes shut, everyone at the office will hear about that soon. He’ll never know peace again. Thank the stars, that he only works part time.

“Yes, that’s alright. Just, take care.”

Peter hangs up after saying his goodbyes. He can never get ahead of that man. Good thing that he spent most of his energy just slandering Spider-Man instead becoming an actual supervillain.

“Who was that?” Wade startles him, he hadn’t noticed or heard him come back into the living room. He’s still wearing his mask and gloves, but he’s not in his suit anymore. He has a white long sleeved shirt and similar sweat pants on as Peter does. He looks more casual, in a way, but he’s still covered from head to toe. Very modest, Peter thinks.

“My boss. He thinks that you abducted me,” Peter says, and he feels very sleepy between the pillows, but gets in a sitting position and tries to blink the sleepiness out of his eyes. Wade approaches him, and sits on the other side of the sofa, careful not to even move the air around Peter’s feet, that he has propped up in the middle.

“Yeah? Maybe I have. Thought about that?” he laughs.

“Oh no, whatever will I do?”

“Wait for your prince, or princess, charming to come to the rescue,” Wade says, He turns more towards Peter. He thinks Wade is probably smiling.

“Ah, I see, you’re using me as bait, to get Spider-Man to come over.”

“What do you think of my masterplan?”

“Pretty weak. He won’t ever show up,” Peter laughs, but it’s not funny the way Wade thinks.

“You two have an interesting relationship,” he says.

“I-um, well, when you know someone for so long…” Peter stammers. He really should cool off with talking about his other self with Wade. He actually hangs out with him as both, eventually he’ll catch on. Peter shakes his head trying to wake up more, and stop getting lost in the nonchalant relaxedness that he seems to be slipping into constantly today. Just like Wade, he might accidentally show his hand. Get more stressed, Peter thinks, get your head in the game.

_Wildcats!_

Now, that’s not helping, Peter thinks amused, and glances at Wade again. What is it about him?

“I mean, you obviously talk to each other. But I can’t decide if you like each other or not,” Wade explains, “I feel like I’m missing something very funny and obvious to the readers here.”

“It’s complicated.”

“But you’re friends?”

“Well, I do sell his photos to a magazine that notoriously hates him, so I guess you can decide.” The Daily Bugle pays the best, so it’s not like he has much choice there, really. But Wade doesn’t know that.

There’s a knock on the door before Wade can say anything to that. He gets up to get the door. Peter leans so that he can see what’s going on. The pizza guy he can barely spot behind Wade looks surprised to say the least. He gets a big tip.

Wade sets the pizza in front of Peter on the coffee table.

“I imagine they’ll start trickling in now,” he says and falls playfully on his side of the sofa. Peter dives into the pizza without waiting much longer, it’s a classic pepperoni pizza. He’s devoured two slices, before he realises he’s the only one eating.

“Aren’t you gonna eat?” he asks.

“Yeah, no. Just enjoy your brunch, or early lunch, or dinner. I never remember which is first.”

“I feel kinda weird eating alone.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Wade says, and gets up again to get the door. The next food he sets down for Peter is Thai.

“How much do you think I’m gonna eat?” Peter laughs.

“As much as you want.” Peter almost expects Wade to add _baby_ to the end, but he doesn’t.

Overall Wade had ordered food from six different places. Peter tries all of the foods, most of them to his taste, but the more take away arrives, the less hungry he is. The conversation flows nicely with Wade, even though he feels a bit weird that Wade’s wearing a mask and he isn’t, and that he’s the only one eating. He evades all further questions about Spider-Man, focusing mostly on their mutually found love for bad horror movies. Wade maintains that the best film he’s ever seen is “Killer Condom.” Peter concludes that Wade has the worst taste ever.

At some point Peter dozes off without meaning to. Just the fatty, heavy food, the warm pillows and Wade’s scratchy voice somehow lull him into an unexpected sleep.

* * *

Peter is hunched over Deadpool’s stomach. He’s holding his hands over him, pushing. He only feels lukewarm anymore, not hot, but not cold either. His hands are drenched, but suddenly he realises that he’s not wearing his jacket, but his Spider-Man suit; His hands are gloved and red.

Peter pulls his hands away in surprise, but as he does so, he sees that it’s not a clean incised wound running over the stomach, but two, deep and disgusting piercing wounds. They spit out blood as he takes off the pressure from them. It’s thick and almost brown in color. Peter doesn’t have enough time before a hand grasps him, and stops him in his tracks. It’s not Wade’s hand, but a hand wearing a shiny green armored glove, the sharp fingernails digging into his wrist.

Peter breaths out unbelievingly as he turns to look at the face of the body he tried to save. It’s not Deadpool, _Wade_ , anymore, but Mr. Osborn. He’s not dead, yet. He holds so tightly to Peter’s wrist that it feels like his bones are breaking, he’s too weak to rip his arm away from the grasp. The mask on Mr. Osborn's face is half broken, revealing his right eye and parts of his lower face.

“You!” Peter yells, and tries to recoil away, but Mr. Osborn has too good of a grip, he’s not going anywhere.

“Peter,” he says, “I loved you like a son.”

“You-you are lying,” Peter cries.

“Spider-Man?” Harry’s voice rings out, just the same as it had on that night. He and Mr. Osborn are splashed with a wave of light, as if a stagelight had been pointed right at them, and Peter can’t see a single thing anymore.

* * *

He wakes up in stages. First of them being profound confusion. For a good moment he cannot recognise where he is. The room is lit by only the city light oozing in from behind the curtains. The soft glow coats everything in the room with a dream-like blanket and it takes Peter a moment to bring everything back into focus.

He’s alone. On Wade’s couch. Covered by a blanket that is not the pink one he’s laying on top of. The food left over has been cleaned away, stashed into the fridge. Peter hopes Wade ate at least a bit after he nodded off. There are no lights on. Peter rubs his face. He can feel sleep scars all over his left side, the one he slept on. He gets slowly up, his body still half asleep, heavy like a rock. The too big sweatpants have somehow stayed on, for which Peter is thankful.

The floor feels cold under his feet. He gets a cup of water, and wonders where Wade has gone to. It’s strange being here all alone. He really seems to trust Peter a lot, leaving him here like this. He doesn’t know how to feel about that. Perhaps a bit flattered. Peter smiles.

He doesn’t want to hang out in Wade’s apartment too long. When he goes to his bag he’s greeted by a bright yellow post-it note, with a funny little self-portrait of Wade in his mask, and a phone number. Peter takes the note off, safes the number in his phone, and then folds the note and stuffs it into the side pocket of his bag. He calls MJ like he had promised himself earlier:

“About time you called!” she answers, but not annoyed.

“Sorry, I ran into… a thing. How’s Harry?”

“He’s a bit better, I think. I spoke him into moving to another apartment.”

“Oh,” Peter says, “Why?”

“It’s not good for him to be reminded about his dad every day.”

Peter smiles a bit, but not happily. “Hmmh, yeah you’re actually right. That’s a good idea.”

“See? If you all would just listen to me, life would be better for everyone,” she says, and the way she speaks reminds him of how she used to be around him. For a moment he believes that they really could be friends again.

“Are you at Harry’s now?”

“Ah, no, I had work to do. I’m on my way home now.”

“Harry didn’t, um, say anything?”

“About what?”

“About me,” Peter says.

“No. We didn’t talk about you,” she pauses, “Why would he have said anything about you?”

“I don’t know. I’m just asking. When is he moving?”

“We’re going to go help him pack on Sunday.”

“Oh, I’m coming, too now?” Peter says. MJ can be so bossy sometimes. He should probably be amused, but the idea of going back makes his skin crawl. But if this is going to be the last, final time, then he could maybe survive it. In a way the idea of stuffing everything into boxes and taping them well shut ~~forever~~ sounds almost therapeutic.

After he’s finished with the phone call with MJ, he checks into the bathroom, if his jacket is there. It is, but it’s soaking in soapy, icky coppery brown water. It’s no use for him wet.

“Hey, can I borrow one of your jackets? Peter,” he texts Wade. He waits a while for him to answer, but it takes too long.

“I’m going to borrow it anyway, thanks!” he writes. Wade doesn’t have a lot of jackets to choose from, for a moment Peter wonders if a hoodie would be a better choice, but that would require him to go into Wade’s bedroom, and the action somehow feels too invasive, so he chooses the dark red one, that looks like it’s warm, but not too warm. It also feels like the most Wade. The red reminds Peter of him, but he plays pretend, that it isn’t the reason he chooses this specific jacket. It’s just the most practical one, that’s all.

Peter takes the subway home. He stares almost hypnotised out of the train’s window, past his own reflection staring straight at him. He’s not tired anymore, but he feels… dream-like, like the hazy unreal blanket draped over Wade’s empty apartment is still somehow wrapped around him. He thinks he should go on patrol a bit earlier today than usual. He has barely anything to do. Or, well, he could edit some of his photos finally. Maybe he’ll do that first. Or tinker with his web shooters, that’s always fun, too.

He doesn’t arrive at a conclusion as the subway train does to the station. He walks home, dragging the heavy unfocused blanket behind him the whole way.

He massages his temples. If he could go back, to that strange happiness he had felt, when he had learned Wade’s real name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enjoy this little snippet I decided to edit out of this chapter:
> 
> “You’re not into feet are you?”
> 
> “Not more than normally.”
> 
> “Define ‘normal’ amount of attraction to feet.”
> 
> “Umm, mild appreciation?”
> 
> “You’re on thin ice, but I’ll allow it.”
> 
> You can decide who’s saying what haha
> 
> Also, “smelly” isn’t actually the most often used adjective about Wade. It probably isn’t used even once, but up to this point Wade’s bad smell has been commented on in the narration everytime (except once!) Wade has been around Peter. Poor guy just gets into a lot of smelly situations :( I don’t feel like checking it, but I think “bloody” is the most frequently used.
> 
> Anyway! Leave kudos and a comment if you enjoyed! Every time I felt unmotivated I re-read the comments I had gotten from you guys <3 they do really mean a lot to us writers ! :)


	6. the skeleton

“Hi!” Harry says, but his happiness seems to simmer down as he realises that it’s only Peter ringing his doorbell.

“Hi!” he smiles back. Oh man, MJ is not here yet, he thinks. That’s kind of horrible, it means that there is no social buffer between them. Harry steps to the side so Peter can walk in and closes the door behind him. He feels the skin on his neck prickling, and the closed front door could very well be the door to a torture chamber, it really wouldn’t make a difference in Peter’s mind.

“So, umm, I hear you’re doing a bit better,” Peter tries as he undresses his jacket, well actually he’s still wearing Wade’s jacket around, and hangs it in the closet. He hasn’t seen Wade after Friday. He never answered any of his texts.

Harry barely answers him, and Peter’s hands feel cold. He tries not to shiver. This is Harry, Peter tries to remind himself, this is the Harry that teased him about his hopeless crush on MJ in highschool, Harry who once laughed so much that he almost choked on his own spit in Peter’s bedroom. Harry who he has always loved very much, why is it now so hard?

Peter blinks, and he actually manages to flash a real, familiar smile to Harry. But he doesn’t reciprocate it. They walk into the living room. There are some boxes already packed, but most of the stuff is still where it had been before.

“You found a new place pretty quick then.”

“Yeah, one of the benefits of being filthy rich.”

“Are there any drawbacks, then?” Peter asks. Harry glances at him and he might be smiling at Peter just a bit.

“So, what’s the game plan here?” Peter asks. He hates moving, and he barely owns anything, moving all this stuff seems imposing.

“I hired a moving company.”

“Of course you did.”

“But I want to pack some stuff myself before they come. You know like photos and stuff like that,” Harry continues. He barely looks at Peter, and the air between them feels icy and distant again.

“Alright, sounds solid,” Peter carries on with the casual tone, “Where do we start?”

“I have a few photo albums and family heirlooms in the extra bedroom.”

Peter follows behind him. Some paintings have already been taken off the walls and placed to lean against the wall next to the door. Harry points him over to the bookcase. The albums aren’t hard to spot. Each one has been marked with a year on the spine. There are some gaps, but they start from way before Harry’s and Peter’s birth year to the year Mr. Osborn had died. After that, Harry hadn’t apparently bothered to keep photo albums. And why would he, really.

“Oh, we need a box,” Harry says, and leaves Peter alone with the albums. Peter glances at Harry’s leaving form, and then pulls out an album at random. He leafs through the pages. The paper is thick and cream colored. Most of the photos are of Harry and Mr. Osborn in parties with other rich important people, colored by gold details, luxurious black wool and white roses. But there are other, more casual photos, too. Some of which Peter recognises as ones he had snapped. He stops on one page. The photo that has demanded his attention feels like a punch to the gut.

The photo is of all four of them. Gwen and MJ on the left and Peter and Harry on the right. They have summer clothes on, and everything around them is lovely bright green. Peter has his arm on Harry’s shoulders and his other arm is holding Gwen’s hand behind MJ. MJ has posed with her arms high in the air and Gwen has copied her pose with her free arm. That’s right, Peter remembers, this had been taken when he and Gwen had been briefly together. Harry has raised his other hand to shield his eyes from the sun, making the photo dynamic and very pleasing to look at. They all are smiling like there are no worries about darker days to come. Peter takes the photo out of the album. He turns it in his hands, he knows there is something written on the backside. The photo had been taken with his camera, though he fails to remember who had taken it, perhaps just some stranger, and he had developed a few copies of this particular picture. He had given everyone one, and he remembers that on Harry’s copy he had written a little message on the back.

“Celebrating Harry’s 20th birthday, Gwen, Mary Jane, Peter and Harry,” reads at the top, and below it: “Happy birthday you rich idiot! You’re like a brother to me. Always your friend, Peter.”

Peter turns the photo again and stares longingly at the people on it. He misses Gwen more than he can describe. Seeing her photo sets something already long dead afire in his guts, and he can feel bitter anger smoldering inside.

“Oh, I had forgotten about that photo,” Harry says, and snatches it from Peter’s hands. He hadn’t realised that Harry had come back and seen the photo. Harry, too, turns it in his hands, and Peter can hear him bridle discreetly. The message is kind of ironic, Peter thinks, considering where they are now in their relationship, almost all the bridges set on fire already.

Harry turns the picture again, and looks closer at it.

“It was a fun day,” he says, finally looking at Peter and smiling, “I still remember it.”

“Yeah… It really was fun.”

“It’s a shame… what happened to Gwen,” Harry says slowly, his face colored by a soft sad smile. “She really was something quite different.”

“I miss her too,” Peter says, but he’s not sad. He’s angry. So angry that his hands almost shake and he wants to form them into fists. Because he remembers what happened to her. What _really_ happened, and that he had _been_ there.

“I need to… go pee,” Peter says quickly, and leaves Harry alone with the photo in hand.

He stumbles to lean over the luxurious sink. It’s made of white marble, and there’s not a speck of dust on it. The mirror, too, is ridiculously clean. Peter looks at himself in the mirror.

His hair is overgrown and he looks almost scary with how dark his eyebags and eyes are. The gray hoodie he has on hangs sadly on him and the bright white light makes him look almost sickly. He forces himself to relax his eyebrows. No wonder that Harry doesn’t like hanging around him anymore, if he looks like this half of the time around him.

Count to ten, Peter, he urges himself. He needs to calm down.

 _One._ It’s okay to be angry, Peter reminds himself. It’s just a feeling, everyone has them.

 _Two._ Harry can have his feelings, he’s entitled to that. Of course he misses Gwen, they were friends.

 _Three._ It’s better that he doesn’t know what a horrible human Mr. Norman Osborn had been. What he had done to Gwen. It’s alright. That doesn’t mean that Harry didn’t or couldn’t love her.

 _Four_ … Harry actually is the innocent bystander. He doesn’t know half of the stuff Peter does. And he had no hand in anything. He just…

Peter closes his eyes and as he opens them he turns his gaze away from the Peter in the mirror.

_Five._

Six.

 _Seven._ Mr. Osborn is the murderer here. Not Harry.

 _Eight_ … Actually Peter’s the killer here, his mind reminds him helpfully.

His anger flares up-

 _Nine._ No! Mr. Osborn deserved what he got!

-and then dies down. Peter feels almost ashamed that he dared to even think that.

 _Ten._ No one deserves to die. Not even Mr. Osborn. And certainly Peter shouldn’t be the one who decides who should die and who not.

Peter breathes out. He looks back at himself. He doesn’t look angry anymore. That’s good. But he still looks out of place. The bathroom itself probably costs more than all his belongings together. Everything is cream colored, and the metallic details somehow look tacky and detached at the same time. Peter just really wants to go home. He can’t deal with both Harry, the ghost of Mr. Osborn and the smoking remains of their friendship at the same time. Just survive today, Peter promises himself, then he can finally turn over a new leaf. He splashes some cold water on his face, like people do in the movies, but all it does is make his face wet.

Peter’s drying his face as he hears the doorbell ring. Finally! MJ’s here.

When Peter comes out of the bathroom he barely dodges Harry, who’s walking towards the front door to let MJ in. Peter momentarily brushes Harry’s chest, before he can get out of the way. His skin feels on fire where he had touched him. The feeling reminds him that they had been very brotherly and touchy before… everything. He hasn’t even shaken Harry’s hand in, he doesn’t even know. When had they stopped hugging?

He watches MJ greet Harry with a familial hug, and then shares one with her himself. It feels weird to touch her, but somehow not having had shared a hug with Harry feels even weirder.

* * *

The day continues onwards with a less awkward atmosphere, now with MJ working as a buffer between Peter and Harry. She tries her best to keep the conversation light, and Peter feels bad for her. They pack up the guest bedroom with its photo albums and some fancy statuettes. They move from there to the living room, and after finishing that up Harry opens the door to his parents’ bedroom.

Peter and MJ follow Harry inside, gently, as if just the air itself in there is precious.

Peter hasn’t been there before. He’s never, in fact, even seen the door open.

It’s not too different from the rest of the apartment. It has a similar color scheme and decor, dark forest green accents, cream, and gorgeous warm wood. The room is clearly regularly cleaned, not a single thing is out of place, and nothing is collecting dust on top. The bed, with an untouched, very well made silk bedspread, is bigger than Peter’s whole bedroom. There are two big windows on either side of the bed, and one on the right wall as well, the biggest one of them half covered by a pretty curtain. The light pouring in is white, and it lands on the hardwood floor like a puddle. On the left side of the room, there is the mirror Harry had written about in his diary. It’s a huge, beautiful mirror. The frame is painted gold, with intricate, breathtakingly detailed, carvings.

Everything else in the room, too, is pretty, maybe even more so as in the rest of the apartment complex. Or perhaps it only seems that way, because Peter hasn’t seen any of this stuff ever before.

Harry wants to take some of the oil paintings off the walls. Peter doesn’t think he’s ever even touched a real oil painting before, he’s only seen them in pictures or museums. He runs his index finger over the upper corner of the painting when he thinks neither Harry or MJ notice. The painting is an abstract landscape, with cool and warm greens and blues, forming into some kind of dreamy horizont. The texture feels sharp and rough.

They gently wrap the paintings into tissue paper and bubble wrap, the same way they had packaged the other paintings in the other rooms. Peter watches as a big family portrait of Harry and his parents disappear under the delicate paper.

“Let’s take that mirror off the wall,” Peter offers, and runs his fingers on the right side of the mirror’s frame. He’s about to grab it when Harry snaps at him.

“Don’t touch it!”

“What? Why not?” Peter asks confused, and he can see through the mirror that MJ, too, turns to look at Harry, her eyebrows raised.

“You’re gonna break it,” Harry says.

“No I’m not. Come on, we can take it down together,” Peter says. MJ nods her head in agreement.

“Don’t touch it!” Harry repeats, almost yelling now. Peter takes his hands off of the mirror and raises his hands in the air to emphasise that he’s not touching it anymore.

“Okay! We’re not touching it,” MJ steps in, trying to calm Harry down. She puts her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. Harry breathes out, trying to gather himself.

“I’m sorry,” he says. But it doesn’t really sound like a real apology, Peter nonetheless decides not to push it.

“It’s ok,” Peter says. He feels just a bit better, seeing that he’s not the only one with a short fuse today. “Is there anything else to pack?” he asks Harry.

Harry shakes his head as a no. He turns a bit to glance at MJ, who smiles at him.

“Is it ok, if I go?” Peter asks, seeing his chance to get home early, “I still have some work to do today.”

Harry shrugs. He looks dark, with the light only hitting him from behind. His face cast in the shadow. He seems to think about something.

“You’re still selling those photos?” he suddenly asks before Peter can get out of the room.

“I’m sorry?”

“Of your boyfriend?” Harry says poisonously. A flame reaches Peter’s throat from his guts, and he’s angry again.

“What’s your problem, man?!” he snaps at Harry.

“Maybe I don’t like you hanging out with a fucking murderer!” he bites back.

“ _WHAT?!_ ” MJ breaks her silence, “What do you mean?”

“I saw him.” He turns momentarily towards her. "Kill my dad."

“Wait. No-no. You’ve just been sitting on that for years?!” she says and steps backwards away from him. She looks lost around the room, and catches Peter’s eyes from the mirror. She turns back to Harry, “Why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

“Yeah, why didn’t you?” Peter says, he tries to look as surprised as MJ, but his voice comes out icy and quiet. For years he had been silent, and just when Peter had thought that this chapter could finally be closed and tucked away, Harry just suddenly had to open the closet and let the skeleton come tumbling out.

“I don’t know,” Harry says. He glances at Peter. “I-I didn’t feel like anyone would believe me,” the last part almost seems to be said only to Peter. Yet you still used it against me, Peter thinks venomously. Harry had never told Peter what he had seen, for which Peter had been grateful, but he had still had to endure the pain and hatred Harry had felt towards Spider-Man. He had always seen Peter as a betrayer. Regardless what he had or hadn’t done.

Though… Peter feels the long cold fingers of guilt run across his spine, Harry’s anger hadn’t really been that misplaced after all.

“No, there has to be more,” MJ insists.

“There isn’t. I just… It felt like no matter if anyone knew no one could stop him anyway.” Harry takes one step closer to Peter, and the shadow over him seems to grow darker.

“This doesn’t make sense,” MJ says, she, too, glances at Peter, but her message to him is different than Harry’s. _Is this true?_ her eyes ask him, _Tell me that he’s mistaken._ Peter turns away from her, and because there is no other place to look, he stares at Harry.

“I had no idea,” Peter says, just to keep up appearances. Though he doesn’t think he’s being very convincing. Peter feels deadly anger rise in him, he turns to look elsewhere, at the silk bed sheets and he tries to calm his breath, but discreetly, so Harry doesn’t notice. He knows that he must look suspicious. He closes his eyes and massages his temples with one hand, “This doesn’t make sense,” he copies MJ.

“I’m telling the truth,” Harry says, almost pleading, but assuredly still. Peter glances at him, from under his brows and hand. He wants to hurt him.

But that’s not fair, that’s not right, Peter’s conscience reminds him. Harry hasn’t done a single thing wrong, he’s the victim here, and you’re the culprit. You should own up, finally, the small voice says, but Peter squashes it like an annoying fly. He needs to get out, right now.

“I need to go,” he says, and doesn’t bother explaining further, “I need to go right now.” He rushes out of the room, just barely not running. A thousand thoughts are swimming through his head, but he can’t slow down enough to say the right thing, to look like he isn’t… whatever they might think he is. A friend of a killer? A killer himself?

“Peter!” He hears MJ come after him. Harry doesn’t, but Peter hears him ask MJ what is happening, before she’s grabbing Peter’s arm in the entryway.

Peter rips his arm away from her grasp. He wishes people would stop grabbing him like that. He pulls Wade’s jacket on, and can’t identify what he’s feeling. All he knows is that he must leave right at this exact moment, or something else horrible will happen. MJ grabs his hand again.

“Peter,” she says under her breath, “What is he talking about?”

“I-I don’t know,” he says.

“You do know,” she whispers heatedly, and looks quickly behind her just to make sure that Harry isn’t coming. That he can’t hear.

“I really need to go,” he pleads. He can feel his hands start shaking.

“I’ll get to the bottom of this,” she says. Not threateningly, but more as a statement of fact. And Peter doesn’t doubt her for a second. She isn’t an investigative journalist just because she’s pretty.

“Just, give me time. I’ll explain.”

That seems to appease her enough to let him go. Peter glances at her just once more before he’s out of the door. She looks confused. Worried. And for a fleeting second it’s not MJ looking at him, but Gwen’s two big eyes.

* * *

Peter’s been on patrol for literals hours by now. He hadn’t thought of anything else to do. He’s still freaking out about what Harry had said. In front of MJ of all people. If anyone, she could pull every single detail out of him. It’s not worth lying to her, she knows him too well anyway.

But what to do and say is a Peter problem. Not a Spider-Man problem. And maybe if he doesn’t think about it too much it’ll just go away, Peter reasons with himself, as he’s swinging through the streets of New York. Now he’s not Peter, he’s just someone else.

But if that’s true, then why can’t he stop panicking. He had lived with the knowledge that he had been involved with Mr. Osborn’s death, and that Harry had caught him red handed at the scene, for years. This tiger has been stalking him for as long as he can remember, and it has finally cornered him.

There is only the hope that he can somehow survive this, too.

Before Peter’s pot boils over he spots someone he trusts to distract him well enough. It’s Wade, and he’s never felt happier to run into him.

“Hi big guy,” he lands next to Wade. He seems startled by his sudden presence. He has a piece of paper in one hand, and he’s rolling a pen in the other.

“Hello to you, too, Webhead.”

“Didn’t notice me coming?”

“Oh, you came already?” Wade says. Peter punches his arm, but not too hard.

“God, I keep forgetting how annoying you are,” he says, “What are you doing here?”

Peter looks around. They’re on a rooftop. There’s a big billboard next to them, advertising ice cream. It catches Peter’s attention for a second and he wishes he had ice cream at home. Besides that there’s really nothing interesting around.

“I’m just chilling,” Wade says, and stuffs the paper and pen into his belt.

“Getting your artist career started?” Peter asks, nodding at Wade’s belt.

“I’m already established, you should come over and see my magnum opus,” Wade says.

“I get the strangest feeling you’re talking about your dick."

Wade shrugs, but he turns to Peter as if he’s smiling and wiggling his eyebrows under the mask.

Before Peter gets to ask Wade if he has something action oriented planned for later, Wade speaks:

“So, how’s your day been?”

Peter doesn’t want to think about that.

“I’m having the worst day of my life,” he says, more or less telling the truth but just to be funny, he adds, “And I’ve been to DashCon.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Wade says, and he actually sounds like he cares. “Have you really?”

“Maybe,” Peter says, before Wade can ask a follow-up question, “How about you, how’s your day?”

“I’ve had worse. Actually pretty good.”

Peter smiles, forgetting that Wade can’t see it. There is a small silence between them.

“Soo, do you have anything fun planned for later?”

“Oh, you’re so forward!” Wade laughs, he presses his hand over his mouth mimicking shock. Peter wants to playfully push at him, but doesn’t.

“I mean like crime fighting stuff.”

“Maybe I do,” Wade says, calming his laughter. His tone gets a bit more serious, “But I need to eat first.”

They descend to the alleyway next to the building they just were on top of by the fire escape. According to Wade there is a pretty good pizzeria close by. He doesn’t ask for a ride, which is a shame. Peter even might have given him one if he had asked nicely. But he doesn’t mind walking either.

As long as he gets to play pretend that everything is more or less okay.

When they get to the ground, there’s a shift in the atmosphere, and suddenly Peter is pushing Wade up against the brick wall. He just wants to feel something, anything. A human connection. He wants to be wanted, and who’s a better candidate than the guy who’s been flirting with him the past week?

Wade is taller than he is, by a considerable amount, and he has to reach quite a bit upwards to reach his face. Peter has his other hand on Wade’s arm and the other pushes against his chest. He knows that he’s stronger than Wade and could feasibly just hold him there forever if he wanted to.

“Kiss me,” Peter breathes, just inches away from him and pulls the mask off his mouth. It bunches on his nose and it obscures his vision a bit. He brings his other hand close to Wade’s face but doesn’t move to lift his mask.

“Uh,” Wade says, catching up, and then pushes his mask up a bit, revealing his chin and lips. He’s about to say something else, but Peter wastes no time locking their lips. He pulls Wade’s face against his with both of his hands.

The kiss is hard and needy. He pushes his body flush against Wade, who is squished between him and the wall. They both taste like salt, and the masks smell damp and unwashed. Wade’s lips are chapped, and his skin feels rough against Peter’s.

Wade’s hands wail around as if he’s unsure where to place them. He eventually decides on Peter’s shoulders, and it feels a bit awkward, like he wants to push him off. But he doesn’t. He kisses him back, and as they pull away for a second to catch their breath Wade eyes Peter up and down. It’s not necessarily clear what he wants, but Peter knows exactly what he personally needs, and he’s mostly sure that Wade probably doesn’t have any complaints about it.

Peter looks up at Wade and licks his lips in a silent question. Wade makes no move to leave, but asks instead:

“What are you doing?”

“Kissing you. Why, you have any complaints?” He’s embarrassingly out of breath. It has actually been a long time since he has kissed somebody like this, sober at least. It feels like his whole body is on fire.

“I guess I don’t.”

“Then good,” Peter says, and pulls him back for another kiss.

Wade feels pleasantly solid against his body. Peter feels fleetingly his heart aching, and he’s not sure exactly why. But he decides to drown that feeling by just focusing on the physical world around him. Mainly this big man in front of him, who is making surprisingly shallow and gentle sounds when Peter moves his mouth from his lips to the corner of his chin and onto his neck, which is still covered by fabric. Wade’s hands move from his shoulders to his arms, from where they drop to hold his hips. His hands are big and warm. And there’s a wave of remembrance that he has not been touched like this either in a long time. The movement feels soothing and almost tender. Peter’s skin tingles where Wade touches him, he almost wishes there weren’t anything between them.

He pushes his leg between Wade’s legs. Wade probably says something, but it gets lost between their lips, as Peter pulls him back for yet another messy kiss. It’s not a particularly good one, there’s too much saliva and their lips don’t move in accordance, but it doesn’t matter.

It’s gratifying that Wade is hard, too.

“Want to touch you,” he says against Wade’s face, “Can I?”

“Yeah,” Wade breathes out. His hands twitch on Peter’s hips and he pushes his groin against his thigh a bit harder.

Peter isn’t looking for a long sensual fuck, just some quick pleasure from a fellow human. But he is still very much enjoying himself. He runs his hand down Wade’s chest, resting his head against the crook of his neck looking down at their groins. Wade’s movements are delicious, and he’s making sounds Peter didn’t exactly expect from someone like him. He’s very mellow and quiet, sighing the smallest _oohs_ and _aahs_. He mostly just breathes heavy. Strange, guess you can never really tell, can you?

His hand reaches the belt, and he quickly works it open. The belt drops to the ground with a heavy thump, and suddenly Peter can see the bulge in Wade’s pants completely unobstructed. He lets out a quiet moan and runs his hand over the bulge. He’s rewarded by a choking sound from Wade, and he smiles privately to himself. He feels himself growing even harder, and he rocks himself a bit against Wade before he slips his hand inside his pants.

It’s very sweaty in there, but that’s beside the point. He runs his fingers over Wade’s penis’ head, and then the shaft. He’s uncut, and the skin feels just as rough as on his chin even through his gloved hand. Wade drops his head to rest against Peter’s shoulder, and his grip on his hips tighten. He rocks Peter ever so slightly against his thigh.

Wade is delightfully hard, and Peter pulls his cock out of his pants for his own viewing pleasure. He gives it a few pumps, and Wade sighs deliciously next to his ear. Peter isn’t exactly gentle. He has quite a hard grip, and he twists his wrist when he reaches the head. He feels his mouth salivating as he watches almost deliriously Wade’s cock push through his fist. Wade breathes unevenly, and it’s driving Peter crazy. He’s never had sex with someone this quiet before.

He takes one of Wade’s hands off his hip and guides it to his own aching crotch.

“Oh fuck,” Wade chokes out, and pushes his hand down Peter’s pants. He wraps his fingers around his penis and pulls it gently out. Peter lets out a moan as he watches Wade’s coated hand jerk him off. He has a much looser grip on him. Peter turns to give a quick sloppy kiss to the closest part of Wade which has bare skin, and then he turns again to watch their hands at work. The light is almost non-existent, but he can still somewhat see the red blush on Wade’s cock and the pre-come glistening on it.

He’s not particularly close to coming, but he can tell that Wade is. He struggles to keep a consistent rhythm with his hand and his other hand massages Peter’s hip roughly. He can’t keep his own hips still and fucks into Peter’s hand. It is glorious.

“Oh God,” Wade breathes out, a bit louder this time, and pulls Peter closer to himself, “don’t stop.”

Peter doesn’t want to stop. He speeds up his hand a bit and moves his other hand from Wade’s neck to his shoulder. He bites his own lip to keep himself quieter. Wade lets out wonderful sounds, his breath catches as he comes. His sperm spurts out in thick ropes landing on Peter’s gloved hand but mostly on Wade’s stomach and thighs. He would lick his hand but putting a gloved hand into his mouth doesn’t seem very appealing.

Wade nudges Peter’s head and catches his lips into a surprisingly passionate kiss. He’s out of breath and seems to momentarily forget about Peter’s member.

Wade suddenly pushes at Peter, catching him off guard and he stumbles back a few steps. Wade follows him and pushes him against the alleyway’s opposite wall. His belt lies behind them, and Peter is too caught up in the moment to care about a full bag of trash just next to his feet.

Now it’s Peter pressed against the wall. It’s imposing, but also very appealing, having Wade tower over him, their lips locked and his hand on his cock. Peter thinks about the sounds Wade let out as he came, and about the cum on his hand and on Wade’s costume. He feels pleasure pool in his lower stomach and breaks the kiss to lean his head against the cool wall. Wade moves from his lips to his neck. It would probably feel very good, if it were bare skin there instead of tight spandex. He can’t stop himself from fucking into Wade’s hand and can’t control the sounds coming from his mouth. It takes a while longer for the sensation of pleasure to grow almost unbearable.

“I’m gonna come,” he says between breaths and moans. Wade breathes unevenly and swears under his breath. He tightens his grip a bit, and Peter is coming all over his hand. His muscles spasm, and his knees buckle. The only reason he doesn’t fall is because Wade doesn’t let him.

They tuck themselves in, and Wade turns so he’s leaning against the wall next to Peter. They both catch their breath, and there’s a slightly uncomfortable silence between them. They try to wipe themselves clean, but it’s not a remarkably successful endeavour.

“You didn’t mind, right?” Peter eventually asks. He doesn’t turn to look at Wade, just looks into the space in front of them. The air is cooler now and it feels a bit like it might start raining later, and he can hear cars driving down the street next to the alleyway.

“No, it was good.”

“Good,” Peter smirks and turns to Wade, “Then we can do it again sometime.”

“Sure, I mean, yes!” He smiles, again surprisingly gentle. The lighting in the alleyway doesn’t really do him any favours, it catches his skin in a strange way. Peter reaches out to pull his mask down. It surprises Wade and he lifts his hand to stop him but moves too slow. Peter covers his own mouth as well. His smile doesn’t show through as well, but Wade must know it’s there. Though, it dies a bit when he covers his face again.

“Hey, maybe you should text Peter, he keeps asking about you,” slips out of his mouth before he can even catch up to what he’s about to say.

Wade snorts, he starts to say something, but then settles for a simple _okay_.

“Anyway, see you later,” Peter says, and turns against the wall to climb it, “don’t forget your belt.” His short lived good mood starts to morph into shame and confusion. He decides that he can’t actually go eat with Wade after that.

Why had he just done that? What’s wrong with him, couldn’t he just once do the right, normal, thing?

* * *

Peter sits on the very top of the Empire State building, peering over the edge. He didn’t know where else to go. Going home seems even worse than sitting up here alone. At least no one can find him up here. An orange light glows softly from below, it reaches upwards like a big hand, painting the rain clouds gathering over the city warm and yellow. It has rained quite a lot lately, Peter fleetingly thinks. The city’s lights catch the raindrops in the air and they glitter their way down. Almost like snow.

It looks dreamy, Peter thinks.

He sighs heavily and leans back, turning his gaze to the sky. He feels empty. Ashamed. Raindrops fall lazily on his mask, and some pool over top of his eyes. They gather, and then run down his face. It’s as if he’s crying. But he hasn’t cried in a long time.

Last time was when Gwen died.

Suddenly he can’t stop his mind from going back. The glittering raindrops look like tears, sparkling on their doomed flight.

Peter closes his eyes and it’s like he’s there again:

“Gwen!” he yells, landing on Fisk tower. The sun is setting, and it casts a golden light over the whole setting.

“Hello, Spider-Man,” the Green Goblin greets in a mocking tone. He’s holding Gwen by her arm. She tries to tear herself free and run to Peter as she sees him, but the Goblin pulls her violently back. She keeps struggling, but she doesn’t seem to be able to pry herself free from his claw. The Green Goblin’s board is next to him, hovering and waiting for its rider. It looks almost alive. The air around it moves as if ready to attack any second now.

“Peter!” Gwen yells, “Peter, he knows. He knows!”

Peter doesn’t understand what she means. He runs closer, but is afraid to close the gap between them.

“What do you want?” he yells over the wind to the man.

“Peter! He knows who you are!” Gwen yells, over the Green Goblin, so that Peter can’t hear what he had said.

“Let her go!” Peter yells. He has a bad feeling. The feeling is so overpowering that he doesn’t even care that the man apparently has figured out his secret. The only thing that matters is that Gwen will be alright. Everything else comes second.

“Peter!” Gwen keeps repeating his name, he can see that her face is red and snotty from crying. Her blonde hair ruffels in the wind. “I think it’s-” she doesn’t get to finish.

“Whoops! That’s too much information!” the Goblin yells over her. He glances at Peter, and Peter gets the coldest feeling that the man might be smiling at him from under the mask.

Everything after that seems to happen slowly. The Green Goblin flings Gwen over the edge. She tries to hold onto his arm, but she doesn’t get a good enough grip from his smooth armor. She falls over the edge, and screams in horror.

 _She’s falling!_ All of Peter is screaming to him, and he’s moving too slow and she’s going to _die!_

Peter takes a few running steps, before he takes the longest jump over the edge, to catch her. He shoots a web to the top of the roof, to act like a climbing rope, just before he goes over it.

“PETER!” Gwen’s voice runs throughout the city.

He can hear the maniacal, uncontrollable laughter bubbling from the green man behind him. It’s such a deep set enjoyment that he can barely stay afloat on his board.

Peter is diving towards her, but can’t catch up. It’s simple physics. He’s trying feverishly to figure out what to do. He shoots a web string towards her, in hopes that it’ll catch her.

The time seems to stop. He can see the lone white string reach across them, trying to catch her. Her arms are extended towards Peter, as if trying to grab him. Her blonde hair, the one that had just been kissed by the wind, is framing her hopelessly stunned face. Her eyes are bigger than Peter has ever seen them. The light reflected from Peter’s suit and the city glitters in them. She might be screaming, but Peter cannot hear it. Tears from her eyes seem to stop in the air, and just float.

The string reaches her, just meters before hitting the ground. Catching her by the front of her jacket. Peter stops abruptly, hanging in the air, and for a long beautiful second he is relieved and proud. Until he registers the loud crack of Gwen’s neck snapping by the whiplash.

He lowers her into the ground gently, and then lets himself fall next to her.

“Gwen,” he says, refusing to believe what has happened.

“Gwen?” he repeats, when she doesn’t answer.

“GWEN!” he cries, and pulls her into his arms. Her eyes are still open, with the city glittering in them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ooh! It's the long awaited sex scene!
> 
> Also, do yall know the feeling when you repeat some word too much and it stops having any meaning? Yeah, I have that but with this whole chapter lmao. I think I need to take a little break from writing so often.
> 
> But anyway! I hope you enjoyed this chapter :) !


	7. revelations

Peter pushes the chickpea curry around his plate. It’s nice and orange, with lemon zest and something green on top as a garnish. It smells pretty amazing, too, but Peter doesn’t feel like eating at all. Which is unusual, there has rarely been a time in his life after puberty that he hadn’t been even just a tiny bit hungry. The tips of his fingers feel ice cold, and he’s worried that the sensation will soon travel all over his body.

MJ isn’t really eating either. Though, because she has some manners, she doesn’t pick at her food like Peter does. She looks at him intensively, almost pestering him to look back, but Peter really can’t. He doesn’t know what to say. He’s lost MJ so many times already, and in some way he feels that this will be the last time he’ll lose her. Just as he had somehow grown closer to her again.

“Peter,” she says finally, after Peter has forced down two forkfuls of the homemade curry.

They’re in MJ’s apartment. The very one they had once almost moved into together. He couldn’t ever afford to live in such a nice place alone, but she can. Very easily, at that, too. She lives pretty close to Midtown, where Harry lives. Or lived. Or lives. Wherever he has moved to. Harry hasn’t told him and Peter hasn’t talked to him after… the whole thing on Sunday.

She has a light brown parquet floor, but it feels a bit sticky under their feet. It had been like that when they had first visited the place, and when Peter had helped MJ carry boxes up to the apartment. They had never quite figured out what had been done to the floor and why it was like that. It’s not something you’d want from a floor, for it to be sticky, but in some way it comforts him a lot.

Some things have changed in the apartment from the last time Peter has been there. While he had never officially moved in, they had broken up just before that, he had had some influence over the decorations. Now she has put up new curtains. The carpet in the living room is different, it’s deep red instead of the light gray one they had picked out together. She has changed some of the paintings around, or put up completely new ones, ones that Peter hasn’t even seen before. He realizes that he hasn’t been in this apartment in months, almost a year even. In forever. Probably after this he won’t set foot here again, after this horrible ordeal will be over.

Why is he here again? He feels the same panic rise in him as before. He wants to get up and leave. That would be the sensible, the smart, thing to do. To get up. And leave and escape and stop being here.

“Peter,” MJ repeats. “You’re doing it again.”

“What?”

“You’re not here.”

“Oh… I’m sorry,” he says, and wishes even harder that he wouldn’t be here.

She pushes Peter’s plate to the side, and leans a bit closer. Peter watches the hair not in her ponytail just almost touching the food on her plate.

“What did Harry mean?”

“About what?” Peter says, and he doesn’t exactly know why he’s playing dumb. They both know what she’s referencing to. MJ looks to the side, just a touch annoyed, but when she looks back at Peter she’s suddenly the same intelligent, empathic girl Peter had once fallen in love with. She gives him an encouraging smile, one that doesn’t look happy at all.

“I-” Peter starts, but doesn’t have the faintest idea how to continue. MJ seems to lean a bit closer, her hair dipping into the curry sauce. Peter doesn’t think to point that out to her. He feels like being interrogated, MJ could just as well just point a bright light on him.

The thought of a bright cone of light hitting him sends icy shivers to his spine.

“Could you not?” he asks, gesturing to her position, and MJ leans quickly back, making her chair rock a bit. She apologises.

“I don’t know what to say,” he finally explains, “I don’t-I don’t know.”

“Well, you could explain what he meant by saying that Spidey’s a murderer?” she prompts.

“I don’t want to,” he corrects his last words.

“You’re starting to make me think that Harry’s actually telling the truth.”

“You mean you didn’t believe him at first?” Peter asks. Something jumps in his chest. Something silly like hope and understanding.

“Well, hasn’t he always had certain types of feelings towards you, um, I mean Spider-Man?"

“I guess,” Peter says, he glances at his cooling plate of curry. MJ had cooked that just for him, and he’s not even eating it. “What did he exactly say anyway?”

“He thinks that you killed his dad,” she says. Peter doesn’t say anything to that. She looks worriedly at him. “Peter, please, just tell me. What happened?”

“No,” Peter says weakly, though he knows he’ll tell her eventually anyway, but saying anything else out loud feels impossible. Like there is a big log stuck sideways in his throat.

“Peter, whatever happened. Whatever you did or didn’t do, I promise that I’ll listen and try to understand,” she says. But Peter doesn’t quite believe her.

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“Why are you so invested in all of this? I mean. I’m your ex. We barely could be in the same room not too long ago. You never were such good friends with Harry, but now you’re staying up nights knocking on his door. I just want to know why is that?” Peter deflects. If he’s here being questioned, she might as well be, too.

“I’m. I’m interested, all right. I’ve known both of you forever, and I think I’m allowed to care about my friends,” she says.

“Yeah, but why now. Last year you didn’t go to such lengths.”

“Peter, we’re not here to talk about what I’ve done. We’re here to talk about you.”

“I won’t tell you before you answer me. Why was it so important to get me involved, too?”

“Because I miss having you two fucking idiots around! Okay? That’s the reason. I want what we had when we were all friends. When you two were friends!” she says, a bit heatedly. She pulls her arms closer to hold herself. She turns her head a but away from Peter, but they maintain eye contact.

“I… I didn’t know.”

“Well, now you do,” she says nonchalantly. Then she takes a small breath and turns to Peter again. She finally pushes her plate to the side, too, and leans on her elbows over the table. “I miss you Peter. I miss him, and I miss Gwen, too. I want to, I don’t know, if I could, I’d want to go back, when we were all okay, and together.”

Peter furrows his brows.

“You don’t mean to get like, together-together?”

She actually laughs at that, Peter would almost be offended, but he can’t find the energy in him to care enough. It mostly makes his mood better, like the nervous energy gets released a bit, with her small laugh. “Oh, god, no,” she smiles, and leans back a bit again. Peter feels glued in his place, and can’t even move his hands from on top of the table onto his lap.

“Okay.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Your turn,” she says.

“I-He’s right.” The words tumble out of his mouth too quickly.

“He’s… right?” MJ repeats slowly after him. She seems… not shocked. Maybe she is. Unbelieving would probably be the best word to describe her at the moment.

“Yeah.”

“I… No.”

“Yes. He’s not lying.”

“You’re leaving a lot of details out,” she points out.

Peter would much rather stare at the painting of a butterfly that’s hanging behind MJ than continue talking. He said the most important thing already. They could leave it at that.

“Well-” he starts, but MJ talks over her. So much about letting him talk.

“Peter, you know you have the personality type to blame everything on yourself?”

“I’m… aware. But this is not about that. I did actually-um. Do that.”

“You killed Norman in cold blood?”

“Well, no. It didn’t go like that.”

She blows air out of her mouth. Peter doesn’t know what she might be thinking. At least she’s not yelling at him. He on the other hand feels weird. Almost detached, like he’s not really even talking about himself but about someone else. He feels… good. Better at least, but not in the giddy way. More like the stranglehold Mr. Osborn has had around his neck for years has loosened, just a touch, but still. His fingers not digging into his skin just as painfully as before.

“So, it was an accident?” she asks. She sips her drink, and plays with her fingers, the way she does when she’s thinking very hard. Peter recognises habit from when he’s seen her at work.

“I don’t really know what it was,” he confesses, “it all happened very fast.”

“What were you even doing around him as Spider-Man? It’s-was he doing something he wasn’t supposed to do? Something illegal?” Now she's getting into the right questions, the ones Peter isn’t too keen on answering. It sounds silly, but exposing Mr. Osborn’s secret identity and what he had been up to feels almost worse than admitting what Peter had done.

MJ notices Peter’s hesitation, and she knows she’s struck gold. Her eyes light up with all the different ideas and theories she has spinning in her head.

“Oh my god, Peter!” she slams her palms on the table and leans closer again. She’s excited, very much like she had been when they had broken into Harry’s apartment last week. “He was mixed up in something! Wasn’t he?!”

Peter stays silent for a while. Sitting down seems stupid and he’d really rather be on the move. Maybe out of the door, too, but he’s in too deep now. He might as well tell MJ all he knows now, and shorten his suffering than have her turn the whole city upside down and figure it out anyway. He gets up from the table and walks all the way over to the window, to peek out. The street looks like an ant nest. They’re pretty far up, and the people look tiny and unassuming down there, going about their daily business. He then turns back to MJ. She sits waiting at the dinner table.

“He was the Green Goblin.” His voice is so calm and natural, that it surprises even himself. MJ blinks, then stares past Peter into the outside, and gets up herself. She clearly has no idea what she’s planning on doing standing up, and she walks around the table, just to tap her fingers on its surface, thinking.

“He was the Green Goblin?” she stops to ask, just to make sure.

“He was the Green Goblin,” Peter repeats again. He sits down on the window sill, but gets up immediately, not wanting to stay in one place after all.

“Then that means…“ she trails off, and Peter waits for her to connect the dots. “That means that he killed Gwen.” She finally looks horrified. She looks static, paused in one moment. She doesn’t say anything for a while. Peter wanders around the room, holding himself, he’d like to climb the walls and the ceiling but he knows MJ thinks it’s kind of creepy.

“So. Was it because of that..?”

“It wasn’t because of anything,” Peter says. He feels his heart start beating in his chest. Not as hard as before, but more noticeably than it had a moment ago. He’s not angry. Or he is, but he can feel the anger ooze wetly out of him like pus from an infected wound. It’s not burning anger, but the type that just makes him very sleepy and apathetic. He finally sits down on the sofa.

“He killed Gwen because she had figured out his identity,” he says with the same calm voice. That unpauses MJ and she snaps to look at Peter again. She walks closer, her hand now draped over one of the chairs.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” she asks. But she’s not blaming him, just asking.

“I didn’t want to,” he says. He had thought about it, but then Mr. Osborn had died. And if he had told MJ after that, she would have found out. That Peter had killed him. He hadn’t wanted that. He still doesn’t want it, but here he is.

“Please tell me now. All of it.”

“I don’t know if I can.”

“Peter,” she pleads. He knows that Gwen had been just as loved by her as she had been by him. But that means that MJ is biased, she can’t judge Peter like he should be judged. He doesn’t know if he actually wants her to crucify him, to burn him alive and finally make him pay. He doesn’t want judgement, but he doesn’t deserve understanding either. He just wants to forget.

But MJ’s right here, begging him to finally show her his hands.

And he does.

“After Gwen died. Was killed. I needed to stop him.”

“She told you who he was?” MJ asks.

“No, she didn’t get the chance. But she did tell me that he knew who I was.”

“How did he know?”

Peter looks away from MJ and turns to glance at his hands on his lap. Even though he had washed his hands before they started eating, his hands still look dirty to him. He furrows his brow:

“I haven’t the faintest idea.” He picks at the side of one of his fingers, “We didn’t have a heart to heart about that.”

“So he kills Gwen. What then?” MJ asks. She’s leaning against the chair with her one arm. The knuckles on his hand look white and strained.

Peter closes his eyes, and he can almost see the Goblin mocking him on his hoverboard.

“He pestered me. Day and night,” he looks back again at MJ. He licks his teeth and doesn’t want to remember more, “Do you remember how towards the end the Goblin would turn up more and more? At the internship, at Bugle, places I just happened to be?”

“...Yeah, I do,” she says, and seems to be mad at herself for not realizing earlier.

“Yeah, well. He knew who I was, but I didn’t know who he was. I just tried to make him stop,” he says. He had never been so afraid for his loved ones. After Gwen had gone, anyone could have been next. Anyone. Perhaps only excluding Harry, but he hadn’t known then what he does now.

He turns to stare at the newspaper article framed on the wall, over the tv, right across from him. It’s the first article MJ ever wrote. He takes a deep breath.

* * *

“Is that the best you can do, Parker?” the Green Goblin mocks him. Peter yanks at the web he’s shot at the Goblin’s hoverboard. The board wobbles in the air, but the man stays on it, laughing at Peter’s efforts.

They’re in an impossibly big hall, it looks like an aircraft hangar, but there’s no plane to be seen. There has been something here, that is clear, Peter can spot small clues here and there, a piece of paper, the way the dust has settled, heavy marks of something having been dragged from the middle of the hall. He had followed the Goblin in here, thinking that he had had the upper hand, but the moment he had climbed inside, it had become painfully, literally so, clear that he had walked straight into a trap. He swings across the room to the other wall, trying to evade the Goblin’s bombs, and other projectile weapons. He hasn’t been hit, at least badly. His suit is still completely intact, but he can feel a bruise forming on his left shoulder already. He has fought many people this far, but the Goblin is the only one he truly, really, hates.

It’s a stupid idea, and he knows it the moment he does it, but he shoots two webs at both of the Goblin’s shoulders and hurls himself back across the room, just so he can have the satisfaction of punching the man square on the face.

When he makes contact with the Goblin, they both fly off the board, and they land the Goblin’s upper back first on the stone floor. It knocks the air out of him. The sound that the man makes is not as satisfactory as Peter hoped, but he nonetheless takes the opportunity to pin him to the floor with his body weight and brutally beats his face with his fists. It’s not his usual fighting style, but he doesn’t care at all about being graceful or how much strength he packs into his blows. This will end tonight. He will finally upper hand him and make sure he won’t ever feel the wind of freedom on his skin again.

The Green Goblin mask cracks a bit under his fists. He can feel it give in. The man tries to stop some of Peter’s blows with his hands, but he can barely do anything, with Peter’s knees pushing his shoulders to the ground. He tries to push Peter completely off of him, but Peter won’t move.

The mask falls apart. The lens over the right eye pops off and leaves a nasty looking dent into the man’s skin around his eye. A long crack runs across the mask to the man’s chin, and a part breaks so that Peter can see parts of his lower face.

“ _You!_ ” Peter screams. He recognises that eye! It’s Mr. Osborn! He stops hitting him, and recoils away from him. He falls sitting down to the side, horrified to learn the identity of the man who has been trying to kill him. Who has killed others already!

Mr. Osborn smiles like a mad man. He gets up, on his knees and takes the rest of his broken mask off, and he looks nothing like the man who had offered to pay for Peter’s education, just in exchange for the promise that Peter would work for him later.

Before Peter can get back up into a better position to fight, Mr. Osborn plunges himself over Peter, his gloved hands wrapping around Peter’s neck. They stumble around, until Mr. Osborn gets the dominant role, and pins Peter to the ground in his turn. Peter can feel Mr. Osborn’s green nails digging into his neck, and the grip tightening. He tries to push the man off of him, but his arms are pinned under Mr. Osborn, and the more he kicks around with his legs, the more pressure Mr. Osborn puts on his neck.

“Why are you doing this?!” Peter manages to say between tenuous breaths.

“After I kill you, everyone will fear me! I’ll be all powerful!” Mr. Osborn laughs.

“This is just a game of power for you?!” Peter can feel tears forming in the corners of his eyes. The disgusting notion that he had never been more than a business investment for him dawns on Peter. It fills him with so much hatred that he feels like he could break every single bone in Mr. Osborn’s body.

“Life is a game of power, Parker. We all want to be the king of the hill, and after I’m done with you, no one will dare to challenge me.” His grip around Peter’s neck grows so strong, that Peter can feel the bones in his neck crunch together. He tries to breathe in but absolutely nothing reaches his lungs. This can’t be it, this can’t be it, he thinks terrified.

As a final lifeline Peter tries to buckle Mr. Osborn off of him once again. He somehow succeeds to free his right arm, and he tries to rip at least one of Mr. Osborn’s hands away from his neck. He manages to loosen the grip and take in a precious little air, just enough to make sure that he won’t lose his consciousness soon. He tries to hit Mr. Osborn, but that enables him to strangle him more strongly again. Peter plunges his thumb into Mr. Osborn’s eye in a desperate effort to hurt him. He hits him right where he intended, and the man recoils away on an instinct holding his face with one hand. Peter throws Mr. Osborn finally off of himself, and rolls away from him. He gets up, ready for another attack. He winded and lightheaded, breathing hurts his throat. He quickly runs a hand over his neck, and can feel some tears in the fabric from the sharp fingernails.

His senses scream to him about an incoming danger. Not from where Mr. Osborn is standing, but from behind him, from the air. He can hear Mr. Osborn laugh, before Peter rolls away on his back and shoots a web in an effort to fling the hoverboard diving towards him with the two long and sharp spikes exposed away from him. The spikes are like the teeth of a rabid dog; intended to hurt and kill. Peter spins the board away from him in a long arc. He tries to aim at the tall wall behind himself. He lets go of the string in his hands too soon, and the board flies towards Mr. Osborn. It tries to correct its flightpath, but only manages to turn so that its teeth turn to grimace towards its very own master. There is a second where Peter considers if he can help Mr. Osborn, to pull him out of the way, but he hesitates.

The hoverboard bites into Mr. Osborn’s stomach. It drags him across the hall and pins him against the wall. There is no yell. Neither him nor Peter scream. Mr. Osborn breathes out open-mouthed, and Peter freezes in place. He can see the two shiny spikes piercing Mr. Osborn’s lower stomach, and digging into the wall behind him. The blood doesn’t splatter, but streams out with such high pressure and speed that it reminds Peter of a broken water valve.

He doesn’t know what to do.

He rips the board away, only realising after that he’s only speeding up Mr. Osborn’s death by doing so. He picks him up, and carries him to his home.

* * *

MJ sits down next to him. She hugs him, and says nothing at all. Peter doesn’t know what more to say.

“I’m sorry, Peter.”

“This all is because of me…” he says. He likes being held, but right now he wishes that she would stop touching him.

She doesn’t say anything to that, and Peter knows it’s because she agrees.

When she finally releases him from her arms, she has tears running on her cheeks. Last year Peter would have brushed them away, but now she has to do it herself. She doesn’t look mad, just sorrowful.

“It was an accident,” she says. Peter doesn’t agree or disagree. It just had happened, and he could have… done something differently, tried to save Mr. Osborn, anything. But he had stood there like an idiot, and then buried everything he could. It doesn’t matter what he had intended or what not, all that matters is that Mr. Osborn is dead. He’s a killer regardless. The only loose end he has left is Harry. And he has started to pull on that string, unraveling everything around Peter.

“No-” Peter starts, but MJ covers his mouth with her hand.

“It was an accident, what killed him was his own damn device, and he frankly had it coming,” she insists. Peter looks away. Whatever, he thinks, that doesn't really ease any of his or Harry’s pain.

“But Peter,” she says, pulling her hand back onto her lap, “you have to tell Harry.”

That’s the only thing he really doesn’t want to hear. His hands shake, but he somehow wills them to stop.

“Peter, he has to know. You weren’t there, but,” she pauses. The more she speaks the more desperate she sounds, “I think that he’s… up to something.”

“What do you mean?” Peter asks.

“Why tell that only now? Four years, and he says nothing. Why now?” she says. She has always had a better instinct in these kinds of situations, but Peter doesn’t think there is anything deeper than anger and sadness below the surface. Harry had had his chances to do everything, but he hadn’t even called up the Daily Bugle to tell Jameson all he ever wanted to hear. It doesn’t make sense for Harry to do anything now that he could’ve just as easily done before.

“I don’t know,” Peter waves his hand, as if to whisk whatever conspiracy MJ is suggesting away from him. “Maybe it’s just part of his grieving process.”

“No, Peter. I have-the way he spoke. Something’s going on. I just don’t know what.”

“No, MJ. You’re wrong,” he says and gets up. “Harry’s just being Harry. And it… Maybe it was an accident. But I’m still responsible for it and.” He takes a breath. He knows that he should tell Harry. Maybe they’re not friends. Maybe Harry hates him. But they’re brothers. Hadn’t he written that to Harry once? “But. I. I can’t. I can’t tell him. At least not now. I really can’t.”

His hands feel sticky like they had when he had watched Wade die and come back in that alleyway.

“I need to go, MJ. Thanks for the curry.” He glances at the practically untouched plates on the dinner table. He feels unreal. MJ doesn’t hate him. In fact she seems to think he’s innocent.

MJ gets up as well, and follows Peter to the entryway. She’s still crying a bit, but Peter doesn’t really know or understand why exactly. It seems almost silly. He wonders if their roles were reversed if he’d cry for her.

Peter pulls Wade’s jacket on. It feels heavier than before, but almost reassuring.

“Whose jacket is that?” MJ asks just to say something.

“It’s mine,” Peter lies.

“No, it’s not,” she smiles. Her eyes are still red from tears, but the smile seems almost genuine. It probably is.

“I-” Peter doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t really want to get into his dating life. Not that it really exists anyway, seeing how he and Wade aren’t even dating. He’s made sure to complicate even that relationship with stupid decisions. “Take care MJ,” he says instead, and is out of the door quicker than she can say anything else.

* * *

Peter stares idly at different photos he has yet to edit on his computer. He fiddles a leftover screw in his free hand. He had tweaked one of his spider-tracers a bit, and to his momentarily joy succeeded in making the design just a tad more compact than before. The screw starts to feel tacky in his sweaty hand, but it doesn’t bother him much.

He should really get on with the editing. The mean looking face of the groom whose wedding photos he had taken last week grimances at him from the screen. Peter has counted five usable photos from the almost thirty they took. Some are just kind of badly taken, that’s on him, but in most of the photos the man looks like he hates even being there.

“I predict a failed marriage,” Peter says aloud to himself, trying to make one of the semi-alright looking photos just a bit prettier.

Peter has tried to distract himself most of the day after his visit to MJ. He even tried texting Wade on a particularly shameless moment in hopes that he’d text him back finally. But he hasn’t. Peter doesn’t really know why that is, Wade had given him his phone number himself. He rolls the screw in his hand, and taps the floor with his foot. MJ’s voice echoes in his head.

So she thinks Harry is up to something?

It almost makes Peter smile. His mouth’s upper corner twitches on its own. That’s a stupid idea.

...But not impossible. It bothers him a lot. She does have some point, and MJ is usually at least better at reading people than Peter. Hadn’t it been her who had warned him about Felicia? Though, that had been jealousy on her part as well. But she had been correct about her using Peter to steal more stuff.

Peter blinks and stares back at the man on his computer screen. His soon to be wife smiles happily next to him, somehow completely unaware of the mood her groom is in.

Peter gets into his suit on an impulse, and sets off towards Harry’s old apartment. Just to give himself proof that MJ’s wrong.

* * *

Peter has swung most of the way to Harry’s old place. He can already spot it in the distance. It’s just as posh and fancy as the buildings surrounding it, but it is the tallest of them. Sticking out like a gold tooth from an all white and perfect smile. The day is already becoming night, the sun setting into the pink and orange bubble bath over the sea. Out of the corner of his eye he spots Wade, standing on a rooftop. It’s almost fitting to run into him again, but this time instead of feeling alleviation, his spider-sense bites into his neck.

Wade stands with a firm posture, a hand holding a gun, aiming steadily at the man in front of him. The man has been chased into the corner of the roof, he eyes nervously at the roof’s half open door too far away from him. His arms raised almost apologetically over his head. The only other way out would be jumping off, but the man doesn’t seem too keen on the idea.

Before Wade can take another shot, Peter swings over him, snatching the gun from his hand. He lands rolling on the rooftop, webbing the gun to the ground. Wade has pulled out his other gun from his holster before Peter can even turn around. He pulls the trigger just as Peter shoots a web trying to snatch this gun from his hands, too, but he misses, catching Wade’s arm instead. His jerk on the string causes Wade’s shot to miss the man, who whimpers when the bullet flies just past him.

“Stop it!” Wade yells at Peter, and tries to aim again. Peter tackles him to the ground. Wade barely fights him, and lands on his back. 

“Shit, buy me dinner first at least,” he says, but it comes out between coughs as the fall has knocked the air out of him. Peter wrestles the gun from his hand, Wade resists harshly, trying to push Peter off of him, until he sees the guy take his chance to run into the open door, and closing it behind himself with a loud klang.

“Do you know how hard that guy was to track down?” Wade asks, going limp under Peter. He hits the roof with his head dramatically, and Peter has a feeling that he might be rolling his eyes under his mask.

“What the fuck were you doing?”

“Ooh, I didn’t know Spider-Man could swear!”

“What were you doing?!”

“Well, whatya think?” Wade looks at him. Peter doesn’t know what to say. Wade had just tried to kill someone.

“Who was that?”

“Something something Brooks.”

“Something something Brooks?” Peter repeats. Disbelieving.

“Yeah.”

Peter leans a bit closer to Wade’s face. “And what had this Brooks done?”

“He hurt a kid,” Wade says, like he’s explaining something really simple to a child, “I have zero tolerance policy for pedophiles. Ya know.”

“You don’t need to kill him,” Peter argues.

“You really think the police are gonna do anything?” Wade argues back.

“You should at least try.”

“Ya know, I have fantasized about you pinning me to the ground like this. But you were a lot smarter in my dreams,” Wade says, “and I guess hornier, like earlier.” He cocks his head to the side and probably smiles, he at least sounds like he is. It dawns on Peter that he is sitting on Wade’s lower stomach, his thighs on his either side, and hands holding Wade’s wrists together over his head. He almost recoils away, but instead holds his wrists down firmer. It must hurt Wade, Peter knows it, but he barely reacts at all.

“No killing. I won’t tolerate it.”

“Alright, alright. I’ll be more discreet next time,” he doesn’t sound like he cares at all. It almost disgusts Peter. How could you speak about taking someone’s life so carelessly?

“That’s not good enough,” Peter says.

“Not even rapists and creeps?”

“No-” Peter starts but Wade interrupts him;

“Let’s not pretend that you haven’t killed, either.”

Peter finally recoils away from him, stumbling backwards onto his feet. Is this about Mr. Norman Osborn? But nobody knows about that, only Harry, and he knew only because he had caught Peter red handed. And guess now MJ, too, because he had told her.

“I haven’t,” he lies.

“No, you just punch people hard enough to knock them unconscious or hurl them long distances and throw them against walls,” Wade says, “People can die from that, ya know. You think the pigs that pick them up give them any treatment? Besides most of the small time crooks you catch, walk free anyway. It’s kinda hard to process someone if the cops don’t know what’s up and the star witness-you-doesn’t even show his face.”

Peter wants to say something, but nothing comes out. Wade gets up to sit. He rests his arms over his knee.

“Not to mention what happens to most of the pedophiles you catch, who do get processed through the system,” he continues, “the way I see it, I’m just cutting the middleman.”

“I,” Peter says. And then doesn’t know how to continue. “No killing,” he eventually repeats, like a broken record.

“Oh don’t act like you didn’t already know of the shortcomings of vigilante justice.”

Peter needs to sit down for a moment. He sits down on the edge of the roof. Wade exits, he tries the door but it’s locked. He jiggles the door for a good while, and Peter almost gets up to rip it open for him, but before he can go do that Wade does it himself. He gives the door three very frustrated sounding kicks, and then pries the door open with such force that it bangs to the outside wall.

Peter turns to look away from Wade. He seems angry, and Peters doesn’t know if it’s because he allowed the man to get away, or because he got caught. It doesn’t suddenly make much difference to him anyway.

Before Peter can process anything more, Wade’s coming back. With much less anger in his pace. Even his steps sound apologetic.

“I’m sorry,” he says. Stopping to stand next to Peter, looking down at him. Peter doesn’t turn to look at him. He’s not upset with Wade. Just… empty. A bit disgusted, but he feels the same way about himself. He wonders if Wade had lied earlier about “getting more picky” and what that exactly meant anyway.

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” Wade sits down next to Peter. Further away than he probably would normally. Peter finally looks back at him. “You actually have a really good track record. I looked it up earlier. There’s just one guy who got really injured after a run in with you. But no one has died. I’m sorry I said that.”

“It’s alright, Deadpool,” Peter says. He’s had too long of a day. Why had he even come here? There isn’t anything to even see here. “Just don’t do it again.”

“I’m… trying, alright?”

Peter feels like touching Wade, patting his shoulder or something. As weird as it is. He should do something more, he had just witnessed and stopped an attempted murder. The more he thinks about what little he knows about Wade, the more likelier it is that he does this more than often.

“You kill people often?” Peter asks just to ask it. He doesn’t really expect an honest answer, but gets one anyway.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. I’m not a good person, Spidey.”

“I’ve met worse.”

“I doubt that,” Wade laughs a bit, “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

“I’m not kidding when I say that I don’t tolerate killing.”

“Just so you know, I really only unalive really bad people anymore.”

“And you get paid for it?” Peter asks. He already knows that he does. In fact most of this information is not really that much out of left field, he should have looked into the guy beforehand. Really this, too, is on him.

Wade is quiet for a second. “Yeah,” he confirms.

“Don’t you think that’s immoral?”

“I know it is,” Wade sighs. “It’s just hard to get out of.”

“Just stop then,” Peter says. He can feel the sun warming his skin under the suit. Summer’s just around the corner.

“I’m trying. I really, really am. I promise I am!”

Peter knits his brows together under the mask. He’s being more lenient on Wade than he probably normally would be.

He looks at his own hands, and for a moment they look like Wade’s.

They could do everything differently, but they’d still be left with their hands. Elbow deep in horrors.

The last sun rays catch the tallest building in Peter’s view. He turns to look straight ahead. The sun casts almost a theatrical spotlight to the old Osborn apartment, before the curtain drops.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Helloo, sorry for a longer wait between this chapter and the last one!  
> Also lmao, sorry for being so dramatic. I really tried to get to the fluffier parts sooner, but I guess we all have to wait for them a bit longer !
> 
> In all honestly. I'm in awe of myself for writing this long. I really thought that this story would probably be around 30k, but we're already past that. My current estimate is somewhere between 50k-60k. I hope at least some of you are excited to get onto that ride! I honestly keep worrying that I'm being too self-induglent with this fic and too dramatic. (But honestly, maybe all Spider-Man media is a bit too dramatic.) I also tend to think way too much about if a scene I've written is good or not, or makes sense in the grand sceme. There definitely are some parts that I now would like to edit out, but I'm keeping them in honor of how this type of continiously updated fanfiction is often written lmao. I'm even just a little bit iffy about how this chapter has turned out, but I think I'm keeping it. 
> 
> I hope you're enjoying reading this silly fic as much as I'm enjoying writing it! (But also I'm making a promise to myself right now, that after I'm done with this story, I'm gonna write something with really minimal plot and all fluff. Like a coffeeshop au or something else cute haha)


	8. a personal crisis

Peter and Wade sit next to each other in silence. Peter looks at the city opening before them. The focal point of that painting being the apartment block where Harry used to live. Much like an evil wizard’s tower. Everything else seems to just point towards that building. The longer Peter looks at it, the more it feels like the building itself is alive. It’s alive and it _hates_ him.

Wade shifts a bit on his spot. He has his hands on his lap and he twirls his thumbs. Slowly the expectant movement migrates from his hands to his legs. He dangles them over the roof’s edge, and Peter can hear Wade’s heels hitting the wall in rhythmic thumps. Somehow Wade manages to draw Peter’s attention away from the city, the apartment, to himself. Peter moves a bit closer to Wade, his hand resting between them on the roof.

“What were you doing in these parts anyway?” Wade finally says.

“Why are you asking?”

“Just, you usually swing through here later in the night or not at all.”

Peter glances away from Wade and then turns towards him again. He licks his lips under the mask. He can feel how chapped and unpleasantly dry his lips are against his tongue.

Super fan, indeed, he thinks. “Is that on my fan wiki as well?” Peter laughs a bit.

“Nah, just something I picked up myself.”

“Am I really that predictable?” Peter asks. Wade rolls his shoulders, and turns his legs more towards Peter. He leans a touch further away from him, leaning against his other arm. Peter can’t really tell, but he feels Wade’s eyes looking up and down on his body, as if assessing him.

“No, I wouldn’t say that,” he says after a slight pause. Looking straight at Peter. He can feel his skin turning warmer on his cheeks. He cleans his throat, a bit embarrassed.

“About that…” Peter starts, but Wade rushes to complete what he’s started.

“Yeah, I understand. It doesn’t have to mean anything. I get that. It can even be a one time thing.” He sounds… Peter doesn’t know. Unsure? Insecure? Peter doesn’t really know what he had planned to say before Wade spoke over him. And he really doesn’t know what Wade means by that, or more necessarily wants him to say back. The stupid mask on Wade’s face prevents him from accurately assessing what he might really be feeling.

“No. I don’t mean that,” Peter says.

“Oh.” Wade turns his head a bit.

“I just. I don’t know. I don’t want anything complicated,” Peter says. If he had wanted sex, why hadn’t he called Wade up as Peter instead of doing it in his Spider-Man suit. So stupid. It’s in every way easier to keep a superhero identity a secret than keep someone finding out your civilian identity, especially if they get to see bare skin.

Though, he hadn’t really planned on doing what he had, had he? It just happened.

“You know, with the secret identity and all,” Peter explicates. He waves his hand between the two of them, indicating their masks.

“Oh no, don’t ya worry about that. Bros keep other bros’ secret identities secret. You don’t need to tell and I don’t need to know.” Wade says.

“Thank you.” Peter turns to look back at Harry’s apartment. He thinks for a while, he can feel Wade’s eyes on him still. He turns to look back at him.

It’s kind of messed up that he already knows Wade’s full name. Guess Wade knows his too, and is familiar with his job and even had him over last Friday. But Wade hasn’t yet connected that name to this one. As far as Wade is concerned, Peter and Spider-Man are two different people, who just happen to know each other. It’s probably best to keep it that way, right? Peter almost starts to think that the fact that Wade seems to be ghosting him, his civilian identity, is a good thing. Hadn’t he already earlier thought about how he needs to stop giving Wade a breadcrumb trail to follow?

Peter lets his eyes wander over Wade’s body just a bit. It’s not like he’d be able to really know what Peter’s looking at. Wade is really attractive. But not in the hot, desperate way. He’s desirable in a slow and soft way. But in ways off-putting, like a lukewarm glass of water. Yet even a warm glass of water can be adored in some situations, preferred even.

Though, he had caught him red handed, with a gun pointed at someone, intent to kill. And still somehow Peter wants him to touch him. Maybe he could, should, believe Wade. Hadn’t he told him unprompted about how he’s trying to get better? He hadn’t stated it explicitly, but he’s doing it perhaps specifically to impress _Peter_. That has to mean something.

Man, why can’t anything ever be simple? Had having sex with Wade as Spider-Man been a bad idea? Yes! But does he want to do it again? … Yes. But maybe he shouldn’t. Here he has Wade, offering him a way out, but Peter almost doesn’t want to take it. That raises the question; What does he want from Wade? By all accounts he is, well, the most gentle way to put it, is that he’s a very questionable character. He can’t befriend him separately as both Peter and Spider-Man, especially when one of those relationships is sexual. Peter at least wouldn’t want to sleep with someone and then find out that the person he’s sleeping with is actually also someone who he already knows and is lying about it. What to do? Couldn’t he have one simple, non-stressful relationship, just once in his life?

“I,” Peter says slowly, tasting the words in his mouth, “I had fun. You’re really, umm, hot.” Spoken like a true poet.

Wade snorts in laughter. And then laughs so sweetly that he has to hold his stomach. Peter smiles under his mask but doesn’t join him. He doesn’t know if he should feel offended by Wade’s reaction.

“Oh, man, Spidey. I’m starting to think that you have really bad taste.”

“I’ll let you know that I’ve been with some very dignified people.”

“Yeah?” Wade laughs, “And now you’ve somehow landed on me.”

“Yeah,” Peter agrees. He feels better again. Wade has some quality that Peter can’t quite pick out that can somehow always cheer him up.

Though his mood doesn’t stay high, it simmers down and sinks like a stone once he glances just in the general direction of Harry’s old apartment. Wade has been a distraction for long enough. MJ is wrong about Harry, Peter just needs to make absolutely sure of it. Might as well do it now and get it over with.

He gets up, without saying anything to Wade. He probably senses some change in Peter’s mood, and gets up as well. He stands very close to the edge, and crosses his arms over his chest. Eyes still glued to Peter.

“So there was some real reason you swung here?” Wade says. He’s more observant than Peter has given him credit for. Need to keep that in mind, Peter notes. Wade glances where Peter’s looking at, and probably already knows where he’s heading next.

“Yeah, I just need to, um,” Peter wonders if it’s even smart to get Wade involved in this whole mess. It’s not like it just concerns Spider-Man, Peter’s just as involved in this, if not more. But there will be nothing to find in the apartment. Right? So no harm, no foul. “I’m just checking on a lead.”

“Let’s go then,” Wade says, inviting himself along.

Peter finally gives him a ride. Wade is very close to him, his legs wrapped around Peter’s waist. He holds onto Wade with his left arm, and their faces are almost touching. Wade babbles most of the way about how this is a dream come true and something about how hot Peter is, right into his ear. Peter doesn’t know about all that. But having someone so warm and solid pressed against your body is kind of nice.

He really can’t get into the mood Wade is in, and the closer they swing to the apartment the worse he feels.

They land on the balcony and Wade doesn’t fall from his grasp, like Mr. Osborn had, he actually holds on even tighter. Wade seems really into the fact that Peter has no problem carrying his weight. He does eventually drop down on his two own feet, after some Peter’s bemoaning.

Peter tries the balcony door, but to his surprise it’s locked.

“Damn,” he mutters, and tries to think alternative ways in. Wade helpfully breaks one of the windows.

“What are you doing?” Peter says, surprise ringing in his voice. He had planned on not leaving any marks that someone had been inside. He hadn’t thought to communicate that to Wade, because he had thought that it was obvious.

“What, it’s an empty apartment!” Wade says, and hops in through the humongous window. It’s from floor to ceiling, and there is absolutely no way that no one heard the window breaking. Peter follows him inside, the broken glass crunching beneath his feet.

The apartment seems ghostly. Clean as ever, but empty. The rooms look bigger than ever before, and Peter feels more and more like the place is about to chomp them both down and swallow them whole.

“What are we looking for?” Wade asks, he’s further in than Peter. He turns back around to face him, and Peter can’t help noticing how much more relaxed Wade seems to be than he is.

“Just, I guess, anything suspicious.”

“There’s nothing here,” Wade points out. He spreads his arms as if demonstrating how much empty space there is.

“This is the, uhh-” Wade walks into the kitchen, and opens drawers and cabinets at random. Peter stays close to the window. He can almost see the trail of Mr. Osborn’s blood running through the living room, from the balcony to where the fainting sofa used to be. Wade remains oblivious to it, but he of course can’t see something that isn’t there. “Damn, what was that ginger’s name. The one who founded Oscorp.”

“Norman Osborn,” Peter says, and the name comes out almost like a whisper. He clears his throat, and tries to look more professional, taking a few confident looking steps further inside. “Norman Osborn,” he repeats. “This is his and his son’s apartment. Or used to, the son just moved away. And Norman, you know, died years ago.”

“What are you expecting to find in an empty apartment?” Wade says, coming back from the squeaky clean kitchen and walking past Peter to open some door. “If they had something shady here, it’s definitely not here anymore.”

“Yeah, well. Just checking,” Peter says, and walks after Wade, who has disappeared into Harry’s old bedroom. He doesn’t want to be alone. Peter almost feels like turning sharply to look behind himself, just to make sure that there really isn’t a ghost haunting this cursed apartment. Harry’s room is just as empty as every other room this far. Wade knocks on the walls, but can’t find anything unusual. Peter mostly just follows Wade around. Either Wade is really unaware of Peter’s mood, or he’s just being really nice by not bringing any attention to it.

Peter knows that the room they should check, if there really is anything peculiar like MJ says there might be, is Harry’s parents’ old bedroom. He almost wishes that Wade would somehow accidentally forget to check that one, and they could just go their separate ways.

Wade eventually does place his hand on the master bedroom’s door handle, it doesn’t really even take him that long to choose that door, the other rooms are just as empty and boring as the last one. The door opens silently, and the cool city light pouring into the room from the outside seems colder and more terrifying than in the rest of the apartment. But not to Wade.

“Wow! I’d call that suspicious!” he laughs. The big mirror is still on the wall. It reflects a picture of them. It’s strange to be here without Harry. The whole situation feels completely wrong. Wade definitely shouldn’t be here, and Peter had promised himself that he’d never come here again as Spider-Man, but here he is.

And there’s _definitely_ something very strange going on with that mirror.

“Why is it here?” Peter asks, not because Wade would know, but more just to say something.

“Secret lair? Panic room?” Wade says. He massages his hands together, and his body language seems very excited.

“What else would it be?” Peter agrees. He remembers how Harry had screamed at him when he had only touched the frame a bit. And the diary, too. Suddenly Peter feels like the biggest idiot there is, because it’s obvious now; There is something behind that thing.

“I love secret rooms,” Wade says. He walks next to the mirror, and runs his hand on the frame’s right side. When he doesn’t find what he’s looking for he tries the other side. There’s a little clicking sound, and then the mirror swings open like a door. Wade steps to the side, and turns to look at Peter. He seems to be smiling, or perhaps waiting for praise, but Peter doesn’t say much of anything.

“What about that Brooks guy?” Peter suddenly says.

“What about him?” Wade asks, weirded out by the sudden change in topic. They were supposed to go in and do something cool. Like mission impossible type hijinks. Or at least kiss passionately before the place blows up or whatever else usually happens in action movies. Maybe the bad guy could walk in on them and they’d have to hide somewhere, while the baddie gives out convenient exposition about his evil plans.

“Well, he got away. And he’s dangerous, right?” They could leave right now, leave this place and never come back. Peter doesn’t actually care to know at all what’s behind there. Because if it’s Mr. Osborn’s hidden room for his Green Goblin stuff, and Harry has found out about that, then both Peter and Harry are in deep trouble. And maybe it’s better to not know than to know.

“Yeah, well. I’m not the only merc hired to, uh, politely ask him to stop living,” Wade says. He pushes the mirror more open, opening up the view better for Peter. The room there is almost completely dark, but there is clearly something in there. A very faint green glow oozes out of there, warning them.

“Oh?” Peter says. He can feel the nervousness in his voice. He knows he should be disappointed about what Wade had said. And worried that there are so many killers for hire in his city, but somehow those thoughts don’t reach his brain.

“The dude happened to piss off a very powerful guy. Someone else probably got him by now,” Wade continues explaining. He peeks into the dark room and then turns to look back at Peter.

“I guess we go in then?” Peter says, he doesn’t mean the sentence to come out as a question, but it still rings as one in the air.

“Well, I’m _dying_ to know what’s inside.”

“Yeah, me too…”

Peter steps through the mirror, following behind Wade. The mirror-door closes behind them with a similar quiet click as before. Wade says something. He actually says a lot of something, but Peter’s brain filters it into semi-distracting noise. The room is very faintly lit by a green glow, emanating from a glass encasing, containing a Green Goblin suit. There is a lot of dust in the room, so much that Peter would probably be coughing up a storm without his mask, but the dust pattern has been disturbed. There are tables with all kinds of knick knacks on them, papers, spare parts, vials of some medical looking substance Peter doesn’t recognize, laptops… All of them have been moved around. Peter walks over one table. His shadow looks hazy and dark over it. He picks some papers up, and leafs through them. He doesn’t get a good chance to read most of anything, picking up just a few sentences of observations of what some obscurely named substance has as a side-effect, before he gets the worst crawling feeling on his skin. He tackles Wade into his arms, and pulls both of them to hide in one of the corners of the ceiling. Hoping that the tall walls and soft light will hide them.

Wade yelps, but Peter stifles him by covering his mouth with his hand. Wade practically lies on top of him with their bodies pressed flush against each other, it’s a fairly uncomfortable position for both of them, or at least it is for Peter. He can’t even see behind himself well. He shushes Wade, who tries to say something, after Peter takes his hand off of his mouth.

There is someone else in the apartment with them. Peter can hear them walking through the living room, somehow not noticing the broken window. But it is kind of dark in there. Wade can hear the intruder, too. He stiffens a bit, and he turns his ear more towards the noise.

“This is straight outta some action film!” he whispers to Peter, who would very much like to hit him, but he settles for shushing him again. “I totally accidentally foreshadowed this in the narration!” Wade continues, and Peter wishes that he’d be here alone instead with Wade.

Though, maybe he doesn’t actually. Better to be with someone than alone. And all of the people he could be here with, Wade is probably the best option. Honestly.

They hear the click of the mirror swinging open again, and a figure walks into the room with them. Peter can only barely see the intruder, from the corner of his eye, but he already knows that it’s Harry. Though, his face is obscured by the bad lighting, and the way he’s looking down on his phone. Peter is almost certain that Wade, who has a better view of the character down there, can’t actually make out Harry’s face at all.

Harry turns to face the Green Goblin suit. His back towards Peter and Wade. He presses some button, which Peter nor Wade had noticed earlier, and the glass encasing around the armor opens up. Harry takes the Green Goblin mask into his hands, very gently. As if the mask is precious to him, and places it on his face. He dresses up in the rest of the armor, never revealing his face to Wade. Peter doesn’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. Though, does it take that much detective work to figure out who the young brunette in the room with them is? Who else has access to this apartment other than Harry?

Wade moves a bit, and his gun on his belt presses into Peter’s lower stomach very painfully. But he says nothing about it. He doesn’t know how to feel about what they’re witnessing. MJ had been right, more than right. But instead of the panic and horror Peter had felt earlier when they had been looking for this room rising onto unbearable levels, they evaporate. Peter feels coolheaded. This is like a nightmare, but it feels like it’s coming true to someone else, not to him. He’s just a fly on the ceiling.

Harry leaves. He takes a hoverboard that has been hidden behind the armor with him. The armored shoes he has on clink against the hard metal floor. It doesn’t seem fitting. The sound echoes in the room, and sounds like bells ringing.

Peter doesn’t realise that he has been holding his breath, until the mirror-door closes again behind Harry. Now that he’s gone, the realization of what he has just seen comes crashing over Peter. He drops Wade not so gently on the floor, who lands with a heavy thump, and comes down after him. His knees give out unexpectedly, and he almost falls over, but manages to keep upright by taking support from the wall behind him. He feels out of breath. Wade kind of looks at him, but doesn’t say anything. Peter doesn’t know what Wade is thinking. He feels embarrassed and shaken to his core. But he’s not necessarily surprised. Not really. This all had been coming for years.

“Who was that?” Wade asks. He glances at the now empty glass closet and then turns to look back at Peter, who is more than aware that he hasn’t been at all that heroic today. He squeezes his eyes closed for a second just to collect himself.

“I-um. I don’t know.”

Wade hums thoughtfully. He walks over one of the tables and moves some papers on it. He picks up a half-finished green glove with long sharp fingernails. He twirls it in his hand, and then turns to look at Peter again, longer this time.

“Are you alright?” he asks, and the question sounds genuinely interested.

“Uhh,” Peter says smartly.

“That must have been the son,” Wade says when Peter doesn’t say anything lengthier or cleverer. Yeah, Peter thinks, it’s the only logical choice. He _knows_ it was Harry.

“I’m having a personal crisis,” Peter says, answering Wade’s earlier question. He doesn’t know why he even says anything, the words just escape his mouth.

“Of sexuality? I’m sorry. I understand that it’s a hard time,” Wade says, and Peter can hear the shit-eating grin in Wade’s voice. He sets the glove back on the table, and brings the now free hand to rest on his hip.

“Yeah, that’s my crisis,” Peter says, and he’d feel annoyed by Wade, but he’s actually helping him a lot by shifting the subject of discussion. “Don’t flatter yourself that much, you’re definitely not the first.”

“Ouch, words cut deeper than knives, ya know,” Wade laughs. He manages to draw out a small smile from Peter.

Peter breathes deeply, and then walks next to Wade. They continue from where they left off before Harry had walked in on them. Peter doesn’t learn much more than what he had already known. He had already known about the OZ formula, what it could do to people, and that Mr. Osborn had for whatever reason been exposed to it, making him who he had become. He had looked into Mr. Osborn’s life when he had done his best to make everything disappear. Though, there had been other people doing that too, mostly his business partners, both legal and illegal. It doesn’t look too good for anyone, if the man you’re working closely with turns out to be a supervillain, and well, if you’re already a criminal, you don’t want any more eyes on you by exposing someone you worked with or for. No wonder Harry is obsessed with bringing his father justice, the walls and unwilling people he must have run into… The only thing he has to go on really is Spider-Man.

While there is no evidence that Harry has continued Mr. Osborn’s work on the formula, there are papers and files on the laptops implying that something else had been added to it. Peter hopes that Harry hasn’t been dumb enough to expose himself to the substance. If it even exists to this day.

“So what do you think his evil plan is?” Wade asks after playing around enough. He leans against the glass encasing and crosses his arms over his chest. He turns his head a bit as he looks at Peter.

Isn’t it obvious, Peter thinks. To avenge his father. But perhaps it’s not as obvious to Wade as it is to Peter. Wade might even think that Harry is the one and only Green Goblin, not the successor.

“Um,” Peter says, and he again wonders how much he should include Wade in this whole mess. Maybe it would be a good thing to have an extra pair of superhuman hands around. Peter draws in breath to explain, but the air gets stuck in his lungs, and no words come out. It feels like a pair of hands are strangling his throat. If he explains what’s really going on, then he needs not only to tell Wade about how the original Goblin had died but also probably his real identity, and somehow it feels more than impossible. But it’s not like Wade isn’t already involved. He’s right here. In the Green Goblin’s secret lair or whatever Wade had called it earlier. He’s _seen_ Harry.

He is _already_ involved.

“There’s something big going on, right?” Wade says. If Peter didn’t have his mask on, Wade could see how stunned he looks. But the mask doesn’t show anything really, maybe his eyes look a bit bigger, but that’s it. Wade is definitely more intune than Peter would like him to be at this point. He should tell him. Right? The more he waits the harder it’ll get.

But somehow every time he opens his mouth to tell him nothing comes out.

“I. I don’t know. But something’s definitely up,” he stammers instead, agreeing with Wade, but not letting him on.

Peter cuts the rest of the night short, and heads straight to home. He promises himself a long night’s sleep, but can’t fall asleep before the sun is about to rise again. He thinks about MJ and Harry. What he should do, and who to tell and what. He thinks about Uncle Ben and how he probably would know what to do, about Aunt May, how he misses her like a small child. When he’s just about to fall asleep, he imagines Wade lying next to him. Unbearably warm, but so comforting that it lulls him right into sleep. The dream man whispers something faintly in his ear, but all Peter gathers from it is a warm sensation and safety. The shirt Wade borrowed him feels soft against his skin, like a pair of arms enveloping him gently.

* * *

The first thing Peter does in the morning is call Aunt May. He really doesn’t call her that often, and so she sounds delightfully surprised when she picks up the phone.

“Hello, Petey!” She greets him happily and so energetically that Peter already knows that she has been awake for hours by now. He glances at the clock on his nightstand, it’s almost midday already. He moves the pillows on his bed into a better position so he can lean against them more comfortably.

“Hi, May,” he smiles. He doesn’t know why he really even called her. Guess he just wants to hear her voice.

“Have you been eating well?” she asks.

“Yeah, thank you again for the groceries last week.” Peter’s lips turn upwards into a light smile, the type that feels airy like the morning sun. So effortless. He closes his eyes for a bit, imagining how it would feel to wake up with a smile like this on his lips every morning.

“Is everything okay?” Aunt May continues.

“Yes. Of course.”

“You know that I can tell when you’re lying, right, Peter?” she says. Peter opens his eyes again, and stares at his dresser. It’s the same he had had in his childhood bedroom. There are even some stickers still on it that he had stuck on it when he had been like ten or so. Over the dresser there’s a small mirror and a poster hanging on the wall, but Peter can only catch the reflection of the very top of his head, and the one hair strand that’s sticking completely upwards.

“I, uh. I’m just, you know. Friends,” Peter stutters. Aunt May can always sense his moods, he doesn’t know how. Sometimes he’s convinced that she knows that he’s Spider-Man. But she of course doesn’t.

“MJ?”

“No, I’m just. I’m having a fight with Harry,” Peter says. It’s close enough to the truth.

“Oh dear. I hope you can work it out,” she says. She does sound truthfully concerned. Peter knows that she has always liked Harry a lot.

“Yeah, me too.” Peter sighs.

“Is there something more?”

“Ah, nothing really,” he lies again. Aunt May thankfully doesn’t press on it.

“You’re not going on dates, meeting new people? It could be good for you.”

“May…” he sighs even deeper. If she’s about to bring up grandchildren again…

“I’m just saying, Peter. Sometimes I worry about you. You should find someone nice.”

“Well, if it lessens your burden at all I _am_ kind of seeing someone, but it’s complicated,” Peter says. He rolls the bedcover’s corner between his thumb and index finger. He hadn’t called her in hopes to talk about his stupid lovelife, but out of all the subjects it’s probably the most preferable by this point.

“What’s her name?” Aunt May says warmly, she’s probably smiling.

“It’s a he actually,” he says. He doesn’t know why he feels embarrassed admitting it, last time she had suggested it practically herself. He’s really just confirming her hunch.

“Oh!” Peter can hear triumph in her voice, she had been right after all! “What’s _his_ name then?”

“It’s Wade. But I don’t really know if anything will come out of it.”

“Doesn’t hurt to try it out,” Aunt May says, “just stay safe,” she continues.

“Yeah,” he laughs.

“So you’re over MJ, then?” she asks. Peter would be offended by the question, but it’s quite a valid thing to ask, seeing how he and MJ have been broken up and gotten back together like three or four times already.

“Yeah. We really just work better as friends. Sorry, no red-headed grandchildren for you,” Peter says. Aunt May laughs.

“Well, I hope this Wade is nice, then.”

“I-he’s um… He’s fun,” Peter says, thinking how to best describe him. Aunt May has already met him even. What had she said about him again? Frightening? Had she said that? Strange at least. Which is a very fair assessment of Wade, to be fair. Though, the same thing could be said about any person who decides to dress up in funky outfits to fight crime in. Which very much includes Peter.

“What are you doing today?” Aunt May asks.

“I don’t know. I might take a walk. I have some emails, work stuff, you know.” He doesn’t want to think about a single thing today. “What about you?”

“Oh, I’m seeing Julie and her husband.” Her new neighbours, who just recently moved into the house MJ grew up in. Aunt May had wasted no time in befriending them.

“That’s nice,” Peter says. He can feel his stomach start growling, demanding breakfast at last. “I’m gonna go now, it was nice talking.” He still has the soft smile on his lips, but it falters when he briefly thinks about the rest of the day that’s still to come.

“Alright, I love you!” she says. She always ends the phone calls the same way. It warms Peter’s heart.

“Love you too.”

Peter gets up, wanders into his kitchen and decides to fry some eggs for breakfast. As he pushes them around his plate, the runny egg yolks leave yellow streaks on his plate that he mops up with a piece of bread. His mind is running on empty. The only real thought bouncing in there is MJ. He should tell her about yesterday night. What he had seen. But it feels almost like a distant dream, a nightmare he’s confusing for a real memory. It cannot be true, he thinks, it’s just something he imagined. But of course, he knows it’s just as real as him and his sunny-side-up eggs are.

He should tell her. She could have some idea of what to do before anything else happens. If Harry’s really running around in the Green Goblin suit, hunting for him, a real fight between them is a very likely possibility, just waiting to happen. And Peter doesn’t know what else to do other than wait.

He could try and talk to Harry, his mind suggests. But just the very idea of sitting down with Harry and explaining everything to him sends cold shivers flying over his skin. But what other option is there? Wait for Harry to come and sucker punch him?

For a moment Peter entertains the idea of running away and creating a completely new identity. But he knows he can’t do it. He loves his city too much, and he had made a vow to keep it safe. He couldn’t ever possibly leave New York and stop being Spider-Man. And besides, Aunt May would be so sad if he disappeared.

But what a dream, to just forget and leave everything in the past. No Harry or Green Goblin to worry about.

* * *

Peter is on the walk he had mentioned to Aunt May. He doesn’t really do walks that often, but the city bubbling with life around him makes him feel a bit better about himself. Someone’s selling small Spider-Man figurines on the sidewalk, and tries really hard to sell Peter one as he passes by. It makes him smile. Yeah, maybe he’s done some mistakes and hurt people, but he’s done a lot of good, too.

The air isn’t any fresher than it is inside his apartment, but it is cooler and crisper. He tries to breathe mindfully and deeply.

The phone is his pocket vibrates, and he considers if he even wants to take it out. The text is definitely from MJ. And while he should absolutely tell her what has happened, he finds himself dreading it. It’s weird having her knowing what happened to Mr. Osborn, who he was and what he had done. You’d think that the fact that she seems to think him as an unlucky participant and not a horrible killer, would make him feel better. But it really doesn’t. He doesn’t know what he wants from her. Nothing really, he almost wants her to forget about the whole thing and keep being angry at him for having been such a bad boyfriend. But you can’t have everything.

He sighs as he takes the phone out and opens it to check the messages. He blinks in surprise when he realizes that the text is not, in fact, from MJ, but from Wade. Wade, who has never before even opened his texts. That Wade.

That’s bad. Though, is it bad? Peter wonders. Wade has the quality to make every situation just a little bit more bearable, and he could really use his company today. What a golden opportunity to keep from worrying about his life, Harry, and MJ.

Wade has sent him a text, asking if he’s hungry. What a silly question! Of course he is!

He invites Wade over to his place, not even stopping to think if that’s the most sensible place to meet with him.

He hurries home, and cleans all evidence of Spider-Man into a box that he hides on top of a bookcase. It takes a while for Wade to turn up. It’s already closer to the evening, when there’s finally a knock on the door. Peter opens it, without much thinking.

“Hey, Petey-pie,” Wade greets him. He’s in his full suit, with all of his weapons and stuff with him. Peter thinks that if he was a normal person he wouldn’t ever let someone like that in. But whatever.

“Ugh, don’t like that,” he laughs, and steps to the side to let Wade in.

“Yeah, wanted to try something new, but… yeah. Bad,” he agrees. Peter can hear a smile in his voice.

“Do you want to order a pizza?” he wastes no time asking.

Wade slumps to sit on the sofa, and breathes out deeply.

“Long day?” Peter asks, sitting down on the floor, on the other side of the coffee table.

“Yeah, kinda. Pizza sounds nice.”

Peter smiles. They order the food, and Wade thankfully offers to pay. Peter could afford to, but he’d rather save some money instead. They sit around in the cramped living room. Wade talks about all kinds of stuff with a speed that is almost hard to follow. Peter finds it oddly relaxing for once.

“That was fast,” Peter remarks, when there’s a loud knock on his front door. He leaves Wade on the sofa, and goes to get the door. He looks through the door’s eyehole just out of habit and as he sees who’s standing behind the door, all the blood in his body turns icy.

He wonders if he could just pretend not to be home, but Harry yells through the door that he can see Peter’s shadow from under it, squashing his dreams. Since when had everyone else become so perceptive?

Wade has crept closer to see what the hubbub is about.

“Trouble?” he asks, leaning against the entry hallway's corner.

“Into the bathroom,” Peter says. If he opens the door for Harry, Wade cannot see him. And Harry definitely wouldn’t be all too pleased to see Peter associate with yet another costumed idiot.

“What?” Wade says, he sounds almost amused.

“Bathroom!” Peter says, trying not to let his voice rise. He grabs Wade and shoves him through the bathroom’s door.

“You have a bathtub!” Wade says gleefully before Peter closes the door on him. He takes a few breaths, trying to calm himself down. He’ll just let Harry know that it’s an inconvenient time, he’ll leave. Won’t even come in. Everything will be alright, Peter tries to reassure himself, no need to get all panicky.

Peter opens the door, trying to look normal, almost as if he’s happy to see him.

“What are you doing here?” He tries with a casual tone.

“Pete,” Harry says, “Something’s-something has happened.” He pushes into the apartment past Peter. He’s so stunned by how determinedly Harry stomps in, that he doesn’t realise to stop him. He runs to catch up with Harry, blocking his way out of the hallway. The bathroom door is just next to them.

“Someone broke in the old apartment,” Harry says.

“Oh dear, that’s worrisome,” Peter says and wonders at which point he started talking like Winnie the Pooh.

“Do you know something about that?”

“Wait, are you accusing me? MJ’s the one who picked your locks!”

“No, they broke the window.”

“That’s horrible! But uh. Harry,” Peter tries to think how to get him to leave as soon as possible. Wade’s just on the other side of the bathroom door and he can hear every single thing. The last person Peter needs to be seen with is Harry. Wade is not stupid.

This whole situation is starting to get out of control.

“I have a guy over!” he says, hopefully in such a tone that Wade understands that he’d appreciate some help.

“What?” Harry says.

“Yeah. I-um, a grindr guy,” Peter lies. It’s such a stupid lie that he can’t believe he’s even trying it out, but his brain is not coming up with anything better. Thankfully Wade picks up on his predicament and yells from the bathroom:

“Babe! Are you coming?” he stammers only a little bit in the start, but overall it sounds pretty believable. Harry glances at the bathroom door and then turns dully to blink at Peter.

“You’re not serious.”

“We all have needs?” Peter offers. He tries to look more casually embarrassed than on a brink of a whole mental breakdown. He doesn’t know how believably he’s pulling that off. “So um, you should leave?”

“No, I have something very important I need to discuss with you,” Harry refuses. Peter notices how his heartbeat starts picking up, he feels sick. Just fucking leave, Peter prays in his mind. Since when had they been on speaking terms anyway, last time went horribly. Who comes over uninvited in this time and age, how entitled must you be, Peter thinks and a small angry fire ignites in his chest. He’s not even apologizing!

“Yeah and _I have_ a-umm. A, a dick to suck! So… yeah,” Peter says, about to achieve a new level of desperation and stupidity, “I’m terribly busy, you see.”

“Why are you being so weird?” Harry asks.

Peter thinks that this situation could not get any worse, but then Wade emerges from the bathroom. Completely naked, no mask, no gloves, just a towel hopelessly holding onto his hips.

“Is he bothering you, baby?” he says. He gets in between the two of them. When Wade’s eyes set on Harry, for a shortest second Peter can see recognition in them. Wade furrows his brows just a little bit, clearly thinking, but the expression flashes so fast on his face that there is no way to know if it ever was there in the first place. But Peter is convinced that Wade recognizes Harry, and this is probably the most horrible thing to happen today. He can feel Wade’s eyes briefly on him, burning a question on his skin.

“Alright! I’ll go!” Harry says, lifting his hands up indicating that he’s not looking for a fight. “We’ll talk later,” he says before he slips out of the door, his eyes locking with Peter’s.

The door slams shut and Peter is left standing in his entry hallway with a naked Wade. He stares at the door, and doesn’t really understand what just happened. He balls his hands into fists, but they won’t stop shaking. His heart races in his chest and breathing suddenly seems like an impossibly complicated task.

It’s not death that he fears, he realises. No. It’s not even Harry potentially saying something very mean to him, because he’s endured that, too, hundreds of times. It isn’t even about Spider-Man being caught with a man’s death on his conscience. He’s horrified of his two lives clashing. He’s afraid of Harry learning who he _really_ is. What he does during most of his freetime. And that it is Peter who caused Mr. Osborn’s death, who watched him go and buried all he knew to bury so deep that it took several years for it to dig its way back to him.

Wade stands next to him, momentarily stunned. Peter squeezes his eyes close and brings his palms over his face, as if he’s a child and still kind of confused about object permanence. But he can’t look at Wade, and he can’t have him looking at him either. His knees give out and Peter sinks to the floor, standing on the balls of his feet.

“Hey,” Wade says so softly that Peter almost doesn’t hear it over his hyperventilation. Wade hunkers next to him, and he can feel a big hand very softly touching his upper back. The touch is feathery light, and so soft that it almost breaks Peter’s heart somehow.

“It’s alright, you’re safe,” Wade continues. His voice is raspy and like wet sand tumbling in the waves. “Breathe with me,” he instructs softly.

Wade’s hand presses against his upper back more solidly, that, and Wade’s counting helps Peter slowly come back to himself. His breathing relaxes, and suddenly he’s laughing so hard that he loses his balance, and drops fully on the floor, his hands holding his chest and stomach.

Wade stands in a slavic squat, with his towel covering absolutely nothing. He looks dumbfounded, maybe a bit spooked. But he smiles back at Peter.

“I’m sorry,” Peter manages to speak between bursts of almost uncontrollable laughter, “This is just so absurd.”

His eyes tear up and he can feel some droplets running across his temples into his hair.

“My life’s such a mess,” he laughs, wiping away the tears. He laughs to himself a moment more, and then gets into a half-sitting position and looks at Wade, a smile running from ear to ear. “I can, by the way, see _all_ of you.”

Wade’s eyes grow big, and he looks very cute with the embarrassed face he pulls. He gets up quickly, the towel that had just barely held onto his hips almost drops in the action. He holds it in front of his member and disappears back into the bathroom. Peter follows him with his gaze from the floor. Wade’s back is very well developed and one could say pretty, or handsome, whichever Wade prefers.

Peter suppresses another laugh with his other hand.

“And here I was thinking that you’re a never-nude!” He drops down to lay on his back again. Bursts of laughter come to him like hiccups.

“Har har,” Wade’s voice echoes from the bathroom.

“I have your shirt and sweats if you’d rather wear them,” Peter yells. Wade’s head pokes out of the bathroom in a comedic way.

“Where?”

“Umm,” Peter realises that he’s been using Wade’s shirt as a nightshirt, and that it’s tucked under his bedsheets. He has two options, either he’ll go fetch Wade’s stuff himself or just tell Wade where to find them. Peter considers if he wants to get up from the floor, and he really doesn’t. So he tells him, the sweats are in his closet, and the shirt under the covers. His Spider-Man stuff is, for once, nicely put away and hidden in a box on top of his highest bookcase. Wade looks a bit at Peter when he tells where the shirt is, but doesn’t say anything. He walks past Peter completely nude without the towel, and comes back from Peter’s bedroom fully clothed, still without his mask. It feels very intimate seeing Wade like this. Peter wonders if the shirt smells like him to Wade.

Wade lays down on the floor next to him. He tucks his hands under his head and stares at the ceiling like Peter.

“You have a bathtub,” Wade eventually repeats.

“Yeah, came with the apartment.” Peter can spot a footprint on the ceiling, and he really hopes that Wade doesn’t notice it. Though, maybe it could be explained away with just reminding him that Peter and Spider-Man are friends, and that Spidey visits sometimes. And climbs on his walls and ceiling, like any other normal person does. Maybe Peter should consider cleaning the ceiling one of these days.

“No kidding.”

“Yeah, can you imagine?” Peter laughs a bit, and he can hear Wade chuckle next to him, but there is still some panic mingling in the air around them, he can sense Wade being just a touch more careful and considerate around him. Peter’s worried that Wade will ask about Harry, so he tries to control the conversation. Not that he doesn’t do that already most of the time.

“Why’d you come out naked?” he asks.

“I don’t think I had a lot of options.”

“Yeah… I’m sorry I pulled you in,” Peter chuckles and turns to glance at Wade. Seeing him without his mask on is… exciting. Intimate. Almost romantic. Wade doesn’t turn to look back at him, and Peter doesn’t look long, he worries that he’ll make Wade uncomfortable otherwise. His chin and nose are strong and handsome. Peter can’t make out the color of Wade’s eyes, but they look very pale, maybe blue or gray.

“Nah, don’t apologize. I’m happy I could help. Though, I’m sorry that your, uh, _friend_ thinks that you’re sleeping with someone like me,” Wade says. He keeps staring at the ceiling, but he turns his face just a tad away from Peter. As if he wants to hide.

“Why’d you be sorry about that? He knows I’m bi already,” Peter says.

“Oh?” Wade breathes, and Peter catches Wade’s eyes staring back at him just before Wade turns his gaze away again. “No, not that. I, um. You are?” he continues, and Peter can’t help his lips turning into a lopsided smile. Sure, Spider-Man is obviously into guys as well, but Peter can’t possibly be assumed to be queer, too.

“Uh, no I mean, that you’re with someone who _looks_ like me,” Wade corrects, the words rushing out like rapids. He turns more towards Peter again, like he can’t really decide on what’s the best position to be in and where to look.

“Well, now that I’ve reviewed all of you I don’t think you’re that bad looking,” Peter says and turns on his side, this time looking straight at Wade, who looks away from him in embarrassment.

“You have bad taste,” Wade says eventually, but he says it bashfully, making him almost more desirable in Peter’s eyes. Such a different reaction from the last time. Peter wonders if he’s more attractive to Wade without his mask on. That’s interesting. Wade doesn’t look back at him, so Peter takes all the time to explore Wade’s face with his eyes.

He really doesn’t know how to feel about Wade. He’s annoying, impulsive, violent even, but Peter has all of those qualities, too. Wade’s also thoughtful, quick-eyed, and he this far has almost always made him feel better. He’s comforting and his skin is very warm. Even just now Wade had helped him down from, what probably was, a panic attack. And he’s pretty good looking, too. Peter sucks on his tongue wondering. It would be so easy to reach over and kiss him.

“The door,” Wade says, interrupting Peter’s thoughts. He blinks at him without registering what has been said.

“Huh?”

“The pizza guy’s behind the door,” Wade repeats. He feels so close, their eyes meet and this time it’s Peter who looks away. He feels embarrassed by his thoughts. He really shouldn’t complicate this mess any more.

“Oh, right,” Peter says and gets up, he hadn’t even heard the knock on the door.

The pizza is just alright, like it usually is. The cheese glistens with fat, and the bell peppers are so overcooked that they don’t almost taste like anything, pepperoni is nice and salty. They’ve moved from the floor onto the couch. Wade eats with similar hurry as before, it almost makes Peter laugh again, but he suppresses it. He doesn’t feel as giddy as just a moment ago, but he’s doing better. His body feels tired, but not in the sleepy way. Peter eyes Wade as he takes another bite of his pizza slice. He has a grease stain on his cheek.

Seriously, Peter thinks, this is the guy I’m interested in? Is it just the case of being obsessed because you can’t have it? But he can have him, just maybe not as Peter.

Wade turns to him and catches his eyes. Peter feels his face burning, even though there’s really nothing to be embarrassed about.

“So, how do you know Harry Osborn?” Wade asks finally. Peter’s been waiting for him to ask, but he’s been hoping for the moment to never come.

“Uhm,” Peter almost wants to say that he doesn’t, but that’s too obvious of a lie, so he opts to tell the truth: “We met in high school.”

“Oh, so you’re the same age?”

“I mean. Um, yeah, we were in the same class.”

“That’s interesting,” Wade says, he wipes his hands on the front of his pants, and turns to sit more towards Peter. He brings his other arm to rest on the back of the couch and leans against it, his face mushing a bit.

“No, it’s not.” Why is it interesting?

“You knew Norman Osborn then, too?” Wade continues.

“Are you always this inquisitive?” Peter asks. He doesn’t feel nervous by the questioning, oddly enough, but he would want it to stop.

“Oh, ya know, you spend some time with a guy who spends his days around journalists. You pick up habits,” Wade laughs. Peter rolls his eyes and throws a pillow at Wade, who catches it easily.

The rest of the evening passes quickly. Wade doesn’t push on the Osborn thing anymore, and honestly thinks more about the bath. He should ask Peter if he could use it some day, lukewarm or cold water feels so nice on his skin and helps with the pain. On a bad day it would be very nice to soak in some soapy water. He hasn’t taken a bath in years, probably. Nor he or the voices can remember the last time. Before he leaves he changes back into his Deadpool suit. As Peter says goodbye to him, he hangs from the doorframe like a starstruck teenager. He gives Wade a really cute smile as he finally closes the door.

That boy is insane, a voice finally says, as Wade walks slowly down the stairs. He agrees, there’s definitely something wrong with him. He adjusts the mask a bit.

 **Spidey’s insane, too!** a second voice adds. That’s true, too. There’s something very suspicious going on. Wade runs his hand on the staircase’s railing, the leather in his gloves creates friction with the cheap plastic covering the railing, and his hand doesn’t slide against it as pleasantly as he had hoped.

He’s hiding something, Yellow spits out. Wade stops in the middle of the stairs.

“Who is?” he asks out loud.

Spidey and Peter, you idiot. It’s obvious.

**I don’t get it** , White moans.

“You mean they?” Wade asks, but he already knows what Yellow is implying. He looks upwards, as if he could see straight through the floors and walls into Peter’s apartment.

What are the odds that two very good looking people, who also happen to know each other, are both into you? Yellow leads him on.

**I agree, you’re plain hurl-ible looking. Get it, get it?!**

“It’s not a good insult, if we’ve heard you workshop it for days, idiot,” Wade says, trying to ignore White. He takes a few steps downwards, and turns his gaze slowly away from the ceiling.

Watch out, you might hurt your head thinking so much, Yellow sighs, frustrated that Wade’s not connecting the dots fast enough for it.

“They’re the same age. All of them.”

**You’ve lost me. Who are we talking about?**

I can’t believe I’m sharing brainspace with you, Yellow says irritably.

“I think you might be right. Something’s not adding up here,” Wade says. He hops down faster, skipping some steps. He had come over to ask Peter about Webs, if he has some personal connection to the younger Osborn. Hadn’t needed to ask in the end. “I guess we’ll see in the next chapter,” he laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hhhhhhhhh oh my god... you have no idea how much time i've spent trying to finish this before the year ends. i think i could definitely make it just a bit better, but um i don't want to. full disclosure, i might go and edit this chapter a bit more later. but we'll see. that being said this chapter is probaby one of my personal favorites. it's so dumb lol. i hope you found it as enjoyable as i did :) !
> 
> I hope the next year will be better for all of us! See you next year HAHAHAHAHA :P
> 
> (also fun fact, this fic is now officially more than a 100 pages long)


	9. foolish hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind the updated tags

Peter has no troubles falling asleep. He feels feathery light and airy when he burrows under the bed covers. They feel at first cool against his skin but they warm up fast. Wade left his sweats and shirt at Peter’s and he has no problem slipping into the shirt yet again for the night. He has an anxious burning in his stomach, but sleep comes easy, nonetheless.

He doesn’t remember the dreams he has, but he wakes up with his heart in his throat and sick in his stomach. The covers and the shirt stick to his skin and feel wet and cold. He sits up on his bed. The dark room feels unfamiliar and hostile, and he can’t tell if the warnings climbing down his back like spiders are real or not. He halts his breathing for a moment and tries to listen. Is he alone?

The darkness in his room eases, and he can see the pile of clothes on his chair and desk, the mirror and poster, and the dresser underneath them. The door is ajar, like he had left it. He breathes out slowly. There is a humm of the living city outside his window, it seeps into his apartment slowly, like blood. There’s no one here with him.

Everything is alright, Peter thinks. He takes Wade’s shirt off of himself and turns the bedcover over. The sheet under him is still damp with his sweat, but Peter doesn’t feel like dealing with it. He turns to his side, and stares where he had thrown the shirt. It looks like a sad black pile, dead, on the floor. Swallowing is hard, Peter notes, and turns again. He can’t calm his racing heart down. It feels like someone is pushing down on him.

He sits up again. The bed cover over his chest slides down, and the air feels cold and unloving against his damp skin. Peter reaches for his phone and the bright light from it blinds him for a second.

“Peter?” MJ answers groggily to his call. Peter doesn’t say anything. He suddenly thinks that it’s a very stupid idea, calling MJ, but here he is, doing it.

“Peter, what’s going on, it’s like four something in the morning.”

Peter opens his mouth to say something, but MJ speaks over him.

“Is everything ok?” Her voice is raspy and deep, deeper than usual. But not foreign, he has heard her speak in this sleepy voice hundreds of times. It feels odd only hearing it on the phone and not in person. He remembers MJ waking up, half asleep, reaching for him after he’d come back from patrol, waiting for him in his own bed, in his home, muttering something about how cold he is, how he should take a shower… How warm and deep her voice had been. How it is the same now.

“I,” Peter starts, and out of habit wants to say that everything is alright, but nothing probably is. Why else would he be calling her? “No. I. Um.”

“Is it about Harry? Did you talk?”

“Yes. I mean, no. No, we didn’t.”

“I need you to speak with full sentences, Pete,” she says. She hasn’t called him Pete in forever. Hearing her call him that now somehow hurts. It hurts a lot, and the shirt on the floor looks lonely and cold. He reaches to grab it and drapes it over himself. Where it touches his skin it feels even colder than the air. He childishly wishes that there was someone in bed next to him, someone he could just cuddle into and fall asleep again with. But he only has his phone and MJ on the other side of the line.

“Everything is messed up, MJ,” he says. His own voice sounds alien to him.

“What? Why?”

“Harry’s, he’s-uh. I don’t know what to do, MJ,” he says, and he feels long fingernails caressing his skin, pressing softly against him, just on the edge of clawing him open.

“Do you want me to come over?” MJ asks.

“Yeah,” Peter says, though he doesn’t know if he actually wants her to. But he doesn’t know what else to say, how to say anything at all really.

MJ arrives surprisingly quickly. She lets herself in with her key, which Peter would probably be pissed off about if it wasn’t night. Now he’s kind of pleased that he doesn’t need to walk all across the apartment to let her in. She doesn’t put any lights on as she makes her way to his bedroom. Peter clicks the bedside lamp on. The color of the light is soft yellow, and it makes MJ’s hair look even more orange than it really is. Peter needs a moment for his eyes to get used to the light, as he’s blinking his eyes MJ sits on the bed next to him.

“I’m sorry,” Peter says before MJ says anything. So stupid that she actually came over. He could have just, he doesn’t know, go back to sleep or eat something or put on some movie. Anything!

“Why are you sorry?” MJ asks, as if it’s not obvious. What isn’t he sorry about? At this point, had he done even one thing he isn’t sorry about?

Peter sighs deeply. His eyes feel heavy, and there are tears behind them, but somehow he can’t cry them out.

“I, uh, saw Harry today. Or yesterday. Whatever.”

“What did he say?” MJ asks. She still has her jacket and shoes on. She takes the jacket off and sets it behind herself on the bed. She has an old college shirt on, similar one that Peter has somewhere in his closet, too. But hers is blue, not green.

“He said that someone broke in.”

“To his apartment?”

“Yeah the old one.”

“I-what?”

“I broke in.”

“You broke in?” she repeats. Her hair is in a loose bun on the top of her head. Some hairs have fallen out, and sit prettily framing her face. Peter, for a second wonders how Wade would look in such lighting.

“Yeah. I broke in with Deadpool.”

“Wait,” she says, lifting a finger to note that she’s trying to catch up. Peter pulls at the bed cover a bit, covering himself better with it. “Deadpool is the guy who kidnapped you last week?”

“What? How’d you know about that?”

“Well, it’s a tiny office, news travel.”

“He didn’t kidnap me. I don’t understand how that’s important.”

“Does he know who you are?” MJ asks, she plays with her fingers.

“God! MJ, I’m not an idiot! Of course he doesn’t. Seriously; Not important!” Peter says heatedly, then he breathes in slowly to cool himself. He doesn’t know what’s going on with him, and getting angry at MJ, who has just travelled all the way to his crummy side of the city just to comfort him, won’t help at all. He runs a hand through his hair. Wade’s shirt slips a bit, but stays on him.

“It doesn’t matter, alright? I went there because you said that Harry’s acting weird, he just happened to be around so we went together,” Peter explains, trying to keep a calm voice.

“Well? Was there anything?” MJ turns her body more towards him. Ever the journalist, always there to capture the story.

“Yeah,” Peter says after a while. He feels like saying anything more will make the nightmare a reality. But it’s real regardless if he says it aloud or not, so he says it: “He found his dad’s old stuff.”

“Like, the Green Goblin stuff?” MJ asks. Her eyes shine like a dragon’s that just found the biggest pile of gold, but her voice and expression are distressed.

“Yeah, that stuff exactly. Wa-Deadpool knows his identity, too.”

“You told him?”

“No, Harry walked in when we were there. He didn’t see us, though,” Peter says.

“He’s using his dad’s old stuff?”

“Yeah,” Peter confirms.

“No one has seen him yet. I haven’t heard anything about someone spotting a goblin on a hoverboard flying through the city.”

“Well, at this point it’s just a matter of time,” Peter says. The air he breathes out feels heavy and too hot.

“What else did he say?” MJ asks. It takes a while for Peter to understand what she’s referencing to. The moment he realizes he feels his face burning, and he feels ashamed to admit to her that he hadn’t given Harry an opportunity to say anything more.

“Sometimes I really think you’re an idiot, Peter. You know that?” she says in a tone that is annoyed, but somehow empathetic at the same time. She shifts to sit a bit closer to him. Peter feels like moving away from her, to maintain the comfortable distance they had, but he doesn’t move at all, just pulls his legs closer to himself.

“I don’t disagree with you. I just don’t know what to do.”

“You tell him the truth!” MJ says in a slightly raised voice. “Peter, this doesn’t end any other way. He will find out one way or the other.”

“I think he’ll kill me,” Peter whispers. The face of Mr. Osborn flashes in his eyes for a fleeting second, his face scrunched up into a horrifying anger. He thinks about Harry, what his face would look like. If he’d look like his father.

“No,” MJ disagrees, like she knows anything at all, “Harry wouldn’t do it. Not to you.”

“He’s out there! Hunting! For _me_!” Peter says, the horror of the situation finally setting in.

“But he doesn’t know it’s _you_ ,” MJ points out.

“Yeah! And I’d like to keep it that way!” Peter pushes the cover off of himself and gets up. The shirt drops onto the floor.

“But you can’t,” MJ says softly, after Peter’s finished with his scene and stops in the middle of the room to stare at her.

Peter blinks away tears that don’t exist. Everything in him seems to be broken. Even his heart is confused and beats with a normal, tired beat.

“...I know.”

MJ stares at him. He’s only in his boxers, but it hardly means anything to him. All he cares, he could be naked and it still wouldn’t matter. Wade’s shirt lies on the floor, wet and cold. If he was here he’d probably say something funny, instead of being quiet like MJ.

“Couldn’t you talk to him?” Peter asks after a while.

“I have, but he won’t listen to me. And it really should be you, who tells him. Not me,” she says very gently.

“You’re right,” Peter sighs. Of course she’s right. He feels stupid standing in the middle of his bedroom, with MJ sitting on his bed. “I’m sorry you came over. I’m sorry you’re involved in this at all, it’s not your burden to carry.”

MJ looks at him weird, as if he had just said something very idiotic.

“Why are you apologizing? I _want_ to help you. I said, I miss you two. I miss _you_.” She brings her hands closer to herself, and looks like she wants to do something with them, but they drop on her lap, useless. Peter doesn’t know what to say.

“Do you seriously think this will end with a summer picnic? With all of us being friends?”

“I have to hope it does. What other option is there?” MJ says, and she and Peter both know that it’s a foolish thing to wish for. He doesn’t have the heart to tell her again how he thinks this will end.

“I’m hungry,” he says instead.

“Then you should eat,” MJ says in a soft tone.

“Yeah, smart,” Peter agrees.

MJ follows him into the kitchen, and points out that he has food, as if he isn’t aware of it himself. He fixes himself a simple sandwich and offers to make something for her as well, but MJ says she’s not hungry.

“So… Who’s the mystery jacket person?” MJ asks leaning against the refrigerator.

“What?” Peter asks through a mouthful. He’s not as practised in it as Wade is and almost chokes.

“I’m assuming it’s a man,” MJ says. Peter can sense how tired she is, not only sleepy but mentally out of it. Guess she wants to talk about something less stressful, fun even. If one could characterize his life as fun. “The one who’s jacket you stole, or whatever.”

That reminds Peter, he should ask Wade what happened to his own jacket, the one he last saw soaking in water at his place. He could go there after work. Ask about it.

“Why is everyone so interested in my lovelife, recently? It’s not that interesting!”

“What else are we gonna talk about?” MJ asks. She turns to take a glass out of one of the cabinets and helps herself a glass of orange juice from Peter’s fridge.

“I don’t know,” Peter says. It’s weird having her here. It’s almost like before, even before when they had ever been together, when they had been just friends. She had asked about similar stuff then, but of course Peter had been talking about her when he had spoken about his crush. Now it seems kind of silly, this probing into his life, as if they’ve ever only been friends. And Harry is just an afterthought, something kind of foolish and meaningless just happening somewhere off screen, not something that’s starting to occupy every thought that runs through Peter’s head, even when he’s just asleep.

“We could talk about your lovelife,” he says.

“Ha! As if something’s happening there!” she laughs suddenly. Peter isn’t sure if he’s heard her laugh in a while. Maybe she has, and he hasn’t just noticed.

“Why not?” he asks. He takes another bite out of his sandwich, a slice of tomato almost drops to the floor but he catches it in the air and stuffs it in his mouth. “You’re quite a catch,” he continues after swallowing, thinking that he certainly isn’t even on the same level as she is.

“Kent did ask me out though,” she says, just remembering it.

“No! Not Kent!” Peter laughs.

“The worst part was that I didn’t realize he had meant it like _that_ , so I did go out with him,” she says, giggling a little. Peter feels for a moment like they’re younger, with less worries. If you can feel old at 25.

“Where did you go?”

“Mickey’s,” she laughs, “I love greasy finger food and tacky fifties music on a first date.”

“Poor guy,” Peter smiles.

“Now he doesn’t even dare to look at me when we happen to be in the same room at work.”

“I didn’t doubt for a second that he wouldn’t be capable of creating even a more awkward work environment,” he laughs with her, and finishes up his sandwich.

Peter makes a bed for MJ on the sofa. He leaves his bedroom door ajar, like before, and as he lays on his bed, staring at the ceiling, he can hear MJ snuffle in her sleep. Wade is probably the type of person who snores, he quickly thinks, and the thought feels comforting. He’d really like to find out. Maybe he will, if he can sort this other thing out.

If he’ll live long enough.

* * *

Jameson might have fired him once again. Peter’s not sure. The threat is starting to lose its magic, now that he’s been fired for the 19th time this year alone. Guess he’ll find out if this is the time Jameson actually meant it when he comes to work again next week. In the meanwhile he’ll occupy his mind with other work stuff. Maybe he could finally send over those wedding photos, he’s been procrastinating that for long enough. All that really needs to be done anymore is to email the photos and drop the hard copies in the mail. Peter smiles a little, as if he’s a conscientious worker, if anything he’s known for being quite unreliable. No wonder his freelance photographer career isn’t really taking off. He’s dependable only as his alter-ego, and even that depends on who you’re asking. But it’s kind of nice to pretend for a little, that work is the only thing pulling him down.

Peter walks lazily down the street. The Daily Bugle’s office stands behind him, and its windows reflect warm sun rays on his back, but they are getting lost behind the clouds. He’s just about to take his phone out of his bag to check something, but what exactly drops out of his brain as he feels his spider-sense tickling his scalp and a woman screams further down the street.

There’s a robbery or something akin to that going on in one of the shops closeby. Peter doesn’t even stop to think what to do, his feet take him to the closest alleyway and he’s already changing into his Spider-Man suit. He webs his bag to the wall, behind some trash cans, so no one hopefully finds and takes it, and runs up the wall and from the roof he swings to the shop to check out what’s happening there. It’s a small thing really. On the scale of total catastrophe to just some webbing needed, it’s like a blink and it’s done.

Peter makes it out of the store, with a smile on his face and a dozen thanks from the shop owner ringing in the air. He decides that a few laps through the neighbourhood couldn’t hurt, now that he’s already in his suit. He feels oddly free and happy. Such a spontaneous and successful event hasn’t happened to him in a while. Though, as it always seems to be in his life, his good feeling and smile don’t stay on his chest and lips for long. But he doesn’t get a lot of time to meditate on it this time.

There is an explosion, a bomb blows up just behind him, pushing him further into the air than he ever meant to swing. He turns to look behind him, and he sees The Green Goblin-no; Harry. On a hoverboard. He yells something, but another bomb he’s thrown explodes just next to Peter, and he can’t hear what Harry shouts. Peter can feel something digging into his skin, and he instinctively tries to cover his head with his arm. A biting shrapnel burrows into his armpit. It doesn’t hurt, not yet.

Time seems to slow down, but only in the sense that Peter feels like he’s watching a slo-mo film of himself flying uncontrollably through the air, between tall, skinny, and fat buildings.

“Oh, it’s raining,” Peter thinks slowly in shock. He’s not sure if he’s shocked about Harry or the rain. Guess it hardly matters.

He can see how he moves his body without thinking, his dominant hand shoots a web towards any building that he sees as he’s hurtling through the air. The web string disappears from his field of vision, and he’s not sure if it grabs onto anything. Only the few glittering raindrops stay. There is a disgusting crack, and a blinding flash of intense pain, and then absolutely nothing. All before he gets to even realize that the raucous sound came from his own skull hitting the street below.

* * *

Peter comes to, in at first an unfamiliar place. Until he recognises it as Wade’s living room. He’s on the very same sofa he had previously fallen asleep on, sometime last week. Maybe Friday? At this point it could be forever ago. His position is not as comfortable now as it was then. There is a very dull but strong pain on the side of his head and stinging on his left arm and upper body. The headache forces him to close his eyes again almost immediately after opening them.

There is a faint sound of rain hitting the windows.

Peter opens his eyes again. The lighting in the room is not strong, almost the same as when he had last woken up there. Someone has pulled the curtains in front of the windows. It takes a while longer for him to realise that Wade is sitting next to him on the floor. He’s not looking at him at the moment, but his hand is resting on Peter’s chest, right on top of his heart. It skips a beat and Peter is almost afraid that Wade will notice it.

“Wade?” Peter says.

“Spidey!” He turns towards him, he sounds happy, but there is a concerned edge in his voice.

“What happened? How am I here?”

“Let me ask the questions,” Wade says, and gets up to sit on the coffee table instead. He takes his hand off of Peter’s chest. He’s hunched over, leaning against his knees. “What city are we in?”

“Uh, New York,” Peter says, confused as to why Wade’s even asking. His head hurts a lot. He moves his hand to touch the side of his face and he realises that the lens on the right side of his face is broken. He feels the sharp edges with his gloved hand. There is a small cut under his eye.

“What year?”

“20XX.”

“Convenient censoring, but you’re correct.”

“What..?”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“I think I hit my head.” His brain feels slow.

“Yeah, but before that.”

“Umm, the Green Goblin attacked me?”

“That’s correct,” Wade says again.

“Do you know your name?” Wade asks, he turns his gaze to the ground and then looks back at Peter from under his brows. He’s still wearing that full face covering mask of his. It’s almost unfair that he gets to hide behind it, when Peter’s being exposed.

“That’s an unfair question.”

“You seem to know my name,” Wade points out.

“Peter told me,” he lies after a slight pause of catching up to what Wade had just said. Fuck, had he called him _Wade_ just now?

“Ya know, Webs, I’ve been wondering… The two of you, Peter and you, seem to share a lot of things, qualities… accents… opinions…”

“He’s just bad at keeping secrets,” Peter tries, but Wade continues over him:

“No. No. Can’t be bad at keeping secrets if there’s no one to keep secrets from. I told _you_ that I can’t die, but four chapters ago _Peter_ said that I had lied to _him_ about that. Yet we, I mean I, had never, to my recollection, told him anything even gesturing to that.”

“I told him about you,” Peter says, he doesn’t know why he’s fighting Wade on this. He’s playing a game he has already lost. He doesn’t even really mind Wade knowing. It somehow doesn’t seem all that important at the moment. In the grand scheme of things Wade Wilson knowing that Spider-Man’s real name is Peter Parker seems infinitely stupid and small. Harry Osborn knowing on the other hand…

“Peter,” Wade says, and sits up more, rolling his neck. He takes off his mask in one solid motion, and Peter doesn’t know where to look. His broken lens doesn’t shield him anymore, Wade can clearly see where he is looking and where not, “I’m not as stupid as you seem to think I am.”

“I’m sorry,” Peter says eventually. He doesn’t know what he’s supposed to feel like. Most of his energy is concentrated on the pain on the side of his head, the shrapnel under his skin… Harry. Wade looks just a touch blurry to him anyway.

“You’re not a good liar,” Wade smiles a bit. Something very soft and warm moves in Peter’s chest.

“I think I’m pretty good.”

“You didn’t even think to conceal your voice.”

“To be fair it only works when I have my mask over my mouth,” Peter says. He tries to get up, but the more upright position hurts his head even more and he suddenly feels sick.

“Then why did you take it off?”

“I don’t know, maybe I’m a bit stupid,” he says, “I think I cut my skin,” he continues, and tries to get up again. Wade reaches over to help him into a sitting position in the middle of the sofa. Peter holds his head. His brain feels like thick jelly, wobbling around his skull. He turns to look at Wade from between his fingers, and then after a while of thinking takes his mask off as well.

“You look like shit,” Wade says.

“I never claimed to look pretty,” Peter says back, but his tone doesn’t quite come out as flippant as he wants it to. It’s just flat.

“Take your top off.”

“I could make a joke here,” Peter says, and grimaces as he moves to remove his shirt. Lifting his left hand hurts a lot, he can feel dry blood pulling at a wound in his armpit. Wade helps him remove the shirt, and takes a good look at his left side, and then turns Peter’s head gently so that he can look at where he had hit his head.

“You don’t have an open wound in your head,” Wade says, his face too close to Peter’s. If he were just a bit more out of it he’d probably try and kiss him. “That’s good.”

Wade gets up.

“Don’t die when I’m gone,” he smiles, but it’s a worried smile. He disappears into the bathroom and comes back with a small emergency kit. It’s barely used, and frankly not very well stocked. Wade explains that he doesn’t really use any of this stuff, and doesn’t have a reason to have this kind of shit lying around.

He doesn’t put any more lights on, which probably hinders his work. Wade has taken his gloves off, and his fingertips just grace Peter’s skin as Wade methodically tends to his wounds. His side isn’t too bad, the cut in his armpit being the only big one. Wade cleans the cut under Peter’s eye. It stings and the smell makes his eyes water, but Peter barely notices. Wade’s eyes are focused on the little cotton pad he’s holding against his skin, but Peter can’t help but stare at Wade’s eyes.

They’re grey, he decides… probably. It’s too dark, and his brain isn’t working as it should be. Too slow. What does the color matter anyway, Peter thinks, they’re nice eyes regardless. He almost jumps when Wade glances straight back at him, catching him. Peter feels like his face is about to catch on fire.

“How did I end up here?” Peter asks again, trying to distract himself from the horrifyingly loving attention Wade is paying to his body.

“Well, you know, I live kinda nearby,” Wade says, with a slightly crooked smile on his lips.

“Yeah, I do,” Peter comfrims bashfully.

“And I usually am where the plot needs me to, I came just in time to drag you to safety.”

“I-the Green Goblin,” Peter wants to ask something, but he can’t quite catch up to what he needs to know, what he even wants to know. He knows that Harry is hunting for him, rightfully so, he remarks, but what exactly he wants to do to him is still unclear. “What-what was he doing? When I hit the ground?”

“He seemed shocked.”

“Shocked?”

“Yeah, he came closer, and when he saw me coming he ran away.” Wade shrugs.

Wade leans backwards, and looks him over. He doesn’t say anything, and Peter feels like he _can’t_ say anything; something’s blocking his throat. He bites his tongue. Talking…

He should talk to Harry. Now, before things escalate anymore. Maybe he can still somehow salvage things.

“I have someplace to be,” he says suddenly, and it feels like someone else is speaking. Maybe it’s his conscience, finally getting a word in.

“What?” Wade says, he looks genuinely surprised. “You can’t go. Do you know how far you fell?”

“I’ve probably hit my head worse before,” Peter says. He knows he’s being dumb, but he suddenly absolutely _must_ find Harry right this second.

“Yeah, more a reason to rest.”

“I don’t think you can stop me from leaving,” Peter points out, and gets clumsily up, fully aware that his stiff movements are hugely undercutting his argument.

“Oh, baby boy, right now I think anyone could take you on.”

“Wanna try?” Peter asks, standing up, he gives Wade a look that he hopes looks menacing, but by Wade’s expression he probably looks a lot more like a weak jerk.

“You should stay,” Wade says slowly, emphasising each word. “Don’t be an idiot.”

“Didn’t you say you like idiots?” Peter says. He runs a hand over the spot on his head that he had hit. The skin there feels sore, and the skull under it is still aching dully. But he really has hit his head worse before, and fell much longer distances. He might not have as a violently effective healing factor as Wade does, but he does have one. Even the cuts on his skin will probably heal up in a day or two, leaving behind only small ugly scars.

“Yeah, I like _alive_ idiots.”

“Yeah, well. You’ll take what you get,” Peter smiles a little and walks closer to the entryway. He thinks that next time Harry sees him he’ll kill him, unless he gets to talk to him right now. Strangely though, he notes, it’s not the killing part that he’s most worried about, it’s something else completely. He just needs some clothes to change into… His bag! It’s still in the alleyway, he realizes. “I won’t die,” he promises after a slight pause.

Wade stares at him blankly.

“Can I borrow some clothes?” Peter asks sheepishly.

He can see Wade swallow, look to the side as if he just heard something from the other side of the room, and then turn back to look at him.

“Okay, fine. Wherever you’re going, I’m coming with.”

That shuts Peter up. His brain works a lot slower than he’d want it to, the pain on the side of his head is taking up most of his thinking power. He wonders if it’s a good idea.

“But you have to tell me what’s going on after we get back. I know deep shit when I step into it,” Wade continues. Peter’s stomach drops, and he doesn’t know why. Obviously he should let Wade know, as he’s so nicely interjected himself straight in the middle of his life. It would be only fair to tell him.

But he kind of doesn’t want to.

Wade thinks that he’s a hero, or someone to look up to, someone to impress. He’s really none of those things.

“I… okay,” Peter promises anyway.

* * *

Wade gives Peter a ride to the alleyway his bag is at first. It thankfully is still there, all webbed up and untouched, albeit a bit wet from the rain. He discreetly changes from Wade’s clothes to his own, under Wade’s watchful eyes, who stands a good fifteen to twenty meters away from him. He’d feel some way about Wade’s voyeurism in any other circumstances, but now the only real thought in his head is Harry. He’s not thinking about what to say to him, how to best approach the situation. Not even how Harry would react to anything he could say to him. He only thinks about him in an abstract sense, like Harry is some unknowable thing, not his old friend. Not someone who he knows.

There is a fervent urgency burning inside of him. He doesn’t even know where Harry lives now. Why hadn’t he asked MJ earlier? How stupid is he?

He sends her a text, but when she doesn’t answer at the very minute the text goes through he calls her.

The phone rings for a while. Peter walks in circles impatiently. Wade stays standing close to his, or someone else’s, motorbike. Peter doesn’t think Wade actually owns a bike himself. Wade has a navy blue hoodie on and the same sweatpants he had worn last week. He has the hood up, and he looks uncomfortable without his mask on in public.

It’s not raining a lot, but enough for it to eventually drench through their clothes. Wade’s jacket thankfully holds water a bit, so Peter’s shirt stays relatively dry a bit longer than his other clothes.

“MJ, what’s Harry’s address?” he asks immediately when MJ picks up her phone, skipping right past greetings. She sounds confused, but tells him after a while of stumbling to remember it.

“What’s happening?” she asks, but Peter doesn’t feel like he has the time to explain.

Peter keeps looking at Wade. He keeps wondering why Wade even cares about him. They just met, and had one night when Peter couldn’t keep it in his pants. Wade doesn’t really need to do anything for him. Unless he wants to offset that rooftop accident, where he had got caught red handed. But Wade had been there even before that. So what gives?

“I’ll tell you later,” he promises. He’s making a lot of promises he doesn’t know if he can keep. “Thank you MJ.”

Peter keeps eye contact with Wade after he ends the call. He stuffs the phone back into his bag, and for a long feeling second just stands there. It almost feels like a scene from a weird indie romance movie. But instead of being on his way to confess his love to someone, he’s going to go and try to… he doesn’t know. Something, anything. Maybe love confession isn’t that far out of left field, by his track record he could go and say even worse and weirder things to Harry.

“You’re friends with Michael Jakcson?!” Wade yells from next to his bike. It snaps Peter out of his head, and he strangely feels like laughing.

* * *

The feeling in the building isn’t much different from the one Harry had previously lived at. Where Mr. Osborn had died. Peter’s mind supplies helpfully. He shakes his head as if to shake the thought out, but it’s lodged tight and won’t shake loose.

The building they’re at is older. The insides look like something out of the sixties, but in the most obnoxiously rich and clinical way. It really doesn’t make Peter think of Harry when he looks around. It doesn’t smell old, though, it smells like nothing. Just an empty shell, an illusion of history.

Their footsteps don’t echo in the hallway when they look for Harry’s front door. The carpet eats all the sounds. Wade tries to talk to him, but Peter can’t talk. The burning in Peter’s stomach reaches higher temperatures the closer they get, and the fire eats all the oxygen he breathes in.

Peter chooses to knock on the door instead of ringing the bell. It makes a hollow metallic sound, and it horrifyingly reminds Peter of the clang the Green Goblin boots had made against the metal floor.

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks when he opens the door for Peter.

“You said you wanted to talk. So here I am,” Peter says. It’s not like his visit is as unexpected as Harry’s had been. And besides, if Harry didn’t want to talk to him, then the lobby downstairs wouldn’t have let them in.

“No, I mean you in plural. Why is _he_ here?” Harry asks, still standing blocking the way into his home. He eyes Wade up and down, as if surprised to see him in clothes this time. Wade pulls his hood lower, and Peter almost wants to reach over to him, but doesn’t. Wade doesn’t fit their surroundings at all, but it somehow makes him more respectable in Peter’s mind.

“Wade’s not coming in,” he explains, “we, uh, just happened to run into each other again.”

Harry says nothing, just slowly moves to the side and let’s Peter in. Wade stays in the luxurious corridor, and he looks like he trusts Harry as far as he can throw him. But he had promised Peter to wait for him outside, and he doesn’t want to break the promise.

Harry’s apartment looks very raw. It’s the only thing Peter can think up when he walks further in and looks around. The sixties hasn’t leaked into this apartment. He sheds Wade’s jacket and leaves it draped over the back of a big white couch. The walls are bare, and there is one very beautiful exposed brick one on one side of the living room. Everything is very light and in its place, but it lacks any personal touch.

There is no balcony, but there are big windows from floor to ceiling. The city outside looks dark and wet. The raindrops cling to the glass and trickle down like tears over cheeks. Peter walks over to the windows to look outside. He faces away from Harry, suddenly very afraid to meet his eyes. The urgent, righteous fire in his guts is suddenly gone, leaving him only with a simmering anxiety throttling his throat. His head doesn’t hurt anymore, but there’s still a slightly hazy fog surrounding him.

“What happened to your eye?” Harry asks from the otherside of the room.

“What?” Peter says and turns around sharply. He runs a few fingers over where he knows the cut is. Why didn’t he cover it up? “Oh, nothing. I-uh. Cut it when shaving.”

“You cut your eye when you were shaving your face?” Harry’s clearly not buying what Peter is selling. Peter wonders about why he’s lying to him, why is he even trying anymore.

“The blade slipped.”

“Okay,” Harry says slowly. He furrows his brows, but only for a second, until he decides to move onto more pressing matters. He walks briskly across the room over to where Peter is. Peter leans against the window and it feels cold against his back. He suddenly realises that his clothes are still wet from the rain. A shiver runs through his body.

Harry opens his mouth to say something, but then doesn’t. A bluish light shines in through the window and it colors Harry’s skin cool and distant.

Why had Peter come here willingly?

“You said someone broke in?” Peter says.

“Yeah.”

“Here?”

“No, the other place. I told you.”

“Oh,” Peter says as if he’s just remembering what Harry had said. The truth is that he can barely forget anything Harry has ever said to him. “Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“But they didn’t steal anything, right?” Peter asks. They’re both playing dumb, he thinks.

“No, no they didn’t.”

“Who was it?” Peter asks. He doesn’t know why he’s asking, he already knows, and doesn’t want to hear Harry’s answer.

Harry glances outside. He has casual clothes on, jeans and a light green shirt. How he looks just now reminds Peter of some very distant memory he can’t quite grasp onto. His tongue feels clumsy and too big in his mouth. It’s impossible to swallow.

“It was Spider-Man,” Harry says, and turns back to look at Peter.

“Did you see him?” he asks.

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I just do. I-I know it was him, I know.”

Peter breathes in. He lets his eyes wander over the room. This doesn’t look like Harry’s place. It’s empty in a soulless way. He turns to look at Harry again, as if to make sure that Harry has a soul in him. But he can’t see it.

“Why would Spider-Man be there?”

“You tell me, Peter,” Harry says, finally showing Peter the venom dripping from his teeth.

“I-I haven’t told him anything,” Peter stammers. His fingertips feel wet and cold. He dares not to look, worried that his hands will be stained red.

“You have,” Harry accuses him. Some part of Peter wants to get angry, to hurt Harry, to show him just how strong he is. But he really doesn’t want to hurt Harry any further. He just wants him to stop. To forget and live on.

“No, I really haven’t,” Peter says, and he’s for once not lying.

* * *

**I skipped forward a bit** , White says, **we’re about to get some!**

Nice.

“Is he like, actually into us?” Wade asks.

Weirdly, yes, Yellow answers, clearly not agreeing with Peter’s choices, but happily obliging anyway.

“Can you give some cliff notes? About the plot. I don’t feel like reading some 50 thousand words to catch up.”

 **I only checked out the sex scenes** , White says.

“Yeah… chapters six and nine are the only ones with any rereading value,” Wade sighs.

**SIXTYNINE!**

We don’t figure into the plot too much, Yellow remarks, getting antsy with boredom.

“Sure we do,” Wade pokes at an old gum stuck to the bottom of his boot with his pinky finger, “We’re the whole point this story exists, it just got a bit away from the writer.”

Ironic, isn’t it. You’re so meaningless that you’re a side character even in slash fiction about you, Yellow says, picking a fight. Don’t say the hurl-ible thing again, I promise I will manifest hands just to strangle you, Yellow warns White before it can say anything.

“Mm-hmm, at least we are about to get some,” Wade points out, and rips the old gum off and throws it somewhere in the direction of the junior now senior Osborn’s door. Bet his apartment looks like the most boring minimalist designer threw up, Wade thinks snidely.

Something about that guy, he thinks, makes him want to hurt him. Just a tiny bit.

* * *

Harry’s expression is hopeless. His eyes are turning glossy, and he turns away from Peter to hide his face. Harry walks aimlessly around the room, and picks up a random adornment off of a long and plain side table. He turns it in his hands like it’s the first time he’s ever seen the tiny white horse statuette. He sets it back in its place and leans over the table, still hiding his face.

Peter wonders about how they both conceal themselves from others. No one knows them. For a fleeting moment he thinks that Harry and he are the same. He leans away from the window, and takes a few steps closer to Harry. He almost wants to leap across the endless space between the two of them and comfort him. Tell him everything. But he feels Mr. Osborn’s cold gloved hands wrapping around him, stopping him from approaching Harry any further.

“You know more than you’re letting on, Peter,” Harry says quietly. Peter can see him balling his hands into fists. His knuckles turn white and his arms shake just slightly.

“I don’t know anything,” Peter says desperately. All the courage he had before he set foot into Harry’s home is just smoke in his lungs, and he can’t stop lying. Why can’t he stop lying?

He should just spit it out. Finish this right now.

But he can’t.

“Why are you protecting him?” Harry asks. He relaxes his hands, and turns around to stare at Peter. His eyes are cold and full of tears that haven’t yet spilled over his cheeks.

“I’m not!”

“You are,” he says. His voice trembles just a touch. Peter swallows painfully. His scalp tingles in a warning, but he’s not exactly sure what the warning is about.

“I. He’s-he’s my friend,” Peter says, and takes one unsure step closer to Harry.

“ _I’m_ your friend!” Harry raises his voice and moves as if he’d like to throw something at Peter. Peter glances at the statuette next to Harry, but it stays in its place, front legs raised into the air and teeth bared.

“I don’t think that you even like me,” Peter says weakly.

“I want to be your friend, Pete,” Harry says. His anger seems to almost disappear from his voice, but Peter can still feel it simmering just under the surface, ready to boil over any second. Peter doesn’t feel angry, he feels scared and trapped in himself. Why can’t he do the right thing? His heart hurts the more he sees how much pain he has caused to Harry, but he still can’t cough up the words he needs.

“You resent me, Harry. You have for years,” he says instead.

“We’re brothers. You and me.” Peter thinks about the photo of the four of them. How much he had loved everyone back then.

“Harry, please. Let this go. You can’t go forward if you’re looking backward,” Peter pleads him selfishly, in one last desperate attempt to save himself.

Harry looks taken aback, and Peter can see how his lips turn into an almost mocking, angry smile:

“Look who's talking,” he says.

“Then learn from my mistakes!”

“I’m sorry, Peter. I just-I just can’t let this go. I _have_ to know. I have to.” Harry slumps to sit down on the sofa. Peter doesn’t know how to feel, what to do. He hears MJ’s words in his head, but he can’t bring himself to do what’s right.

When he looks at Harry’s curled up form on the couch, his head in his hands, fighting against tears that don’t listen, all Peter can feel in his heart is tremendous pity. But he’s afraid, too. He doesn’t _want_ Harry to know who he is, what he has done and seen.

Peter walks closer to him, but doesn’t sit down.

“He didn’t even love you, Harry. You know that, he was a vile old man, and I still remember how he treated you, even if you don’t,” he says, and hopes Harry will hear him, listen to him. Harry looks up at Peter. “Please, Harry. Don’t. Please don’t do something you can’t take back. Don’t be stupid.”

“You know who Spider-Man is, right?” Harry says. His eyes are red and watery, but angry. His voice comes out strong, heated, and yet another cold shiver runs through Peter’s body. “You're his, I don’t even know what you are to him. Are you seriously fucking him? Is that why you keep protecting him, _choosing_ him over me? You choose that guy over _me_? We’ve known each other since high school! Doesn’t that mean shit to you?!”

“It means so much to me! I love you, man. But I-I can’t. I don’t know…”

“You know what? What the fucking ever.” Harry stands up unexpectedly. Peter had forgotten that Harry’s just a little bit taller than him. He feels small, smaller than usual. Even though he knows he’s stronger than Harry, he feels powerless against him. “We don’t need to be friends. We aren’t brothers. I was stupid to even think that. That’s fine. Keep protecting him. Just do this one, this one thing for me. Would you, Peter?”

“Do what?” Peter’s voice is quiet, soft as a whisper.

“Tell him to come to the Oscorp lab, down at Seaport. You know the one, used to intern there. Tomorrow, at nightfall.” He doesn’t say it, but Peter can tell that Harry must think that Peter already knows he’s the new Green Goblin. And he’s completely correct, Peter does know.

“...I remember.” He had interned there with Harry, but they closed down the lab quite some time ago. “I’ll-I’ll tell him that.”

“Thank you,” Harry huffs and turns to stomp around the room to mitigate this sudden anger. He breathes in and out deeply, and wipes his tears away with one hand.

“I’m… I’m sorry, Harry. I’m not a good person.” Peter feels stuck in one place. His hands sting and feel cold. He’s afraid he’ll drip Mr. Osborn’s blood on the white furniture.

“That’s something we can agree on, then.”

“I should go…”

“Yeah, Wade’s waiting for you.”

Peter grabs Wade’s jacket off the sofa, and pulls it slowly on. This didn’t go exactly to plan. But then again, he never even had a plan. Peter feels defeated. He can’t outrun this anymore. What had happened years ago has finally caught up to him, and he can only just let it happen to him.

Maybe he deserves it, he thinks.

Harry follows him like a hound dog to the entryway, as if he doesn’t trust Peter to find his own way out. He opens the door for him, and looks waiting for Peter to go away. Wade sits on the floor, down the hall. As soon as the door opens he perks up, and he and Peter share a quick eye contact before Peter turns to say just one more thing to Harry.

“Please, Harry. Stop looking,” he pleads.

“Why?”

“If you love me-if you love your father. Then you should stop. You’re-you’re better than him. Don’t make the same mistake.” Harry stares at him, and so does Wade. He gets slowly up, and waits for Peter. Peter knows Wade can hear them, but he barely cares anymore. He has only a day left. If that.

“Are you threatening me, Petey?” Harry asks in a soft cadence.

“I’m not. I’m just saying. I know that you’ve always been better than your dad. Don’t let him pull you down to his level.”

“You don’t know shit about my dad,” Harry says poisonously.

“I… Maybe I know more than you.”

“What do you mean?” Harry blinks. His eyes are bigger, and Peter can hear the same sadness as before in his voice again.

“I’ll tell Spidey to meet you tomorrow,” he says almost dismissively, he feels a cold stab in his chest as he does so, and walks past Harry, through the open door to the hallway. “Just… Don’t be stupid like me. You were always the smart one out of the two of us,” he continues, before he walks as fast as he can towards Wade, and then past him. Into the rain outside.

Harry stares at Peter’s back as he flees from the scene. He turns to glance at Wade, who gives him a big smile and thumbs up, before he, too, disappears after Peter.

* * *

They go to Peter’s place. Peter doesn’t want all of his food going to waste, now that he has some. And he doesn’t want to be alone, but in his mind that’s the secondary reason. But he also really doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t want to even think. For the whole trip upstairs he’s distractingly aware that it’s Wade who’s climbing the stairs just behind him.

Peter opens the door for him, and let’s Wade in first. He glances at Wade as he passes by him. He pulls the door shut after himself, and reaches out to tug at the back of Wade’s still damp hoodie. Wade turns around, with a look in his eyes. As if he knows something Peter doesn’t, but it gets lost behind an almost sad kind of gentleness. Peter takes one of Wade’s hands and brings it to rest at the nape of his neck. Wade reaches down to catch Peter’s lips with his own, or Peter reaches up, he doesn’t know. It hardly matters much. The kiss tastes salty, and Peter can feel Wade’s hand come and caress his lower back slowly. It’s an unsure touch, just barely there.

The air in his apartment feels warm. Safe. Their clothes feel colder and wetter than they did just a moment ago.

“It’s weird that it’s you,” Wade says when Peter unlocks their lips. It’s not really what he wants to hear. He bites the inside of his cheek.

“Is it?”

“Well. Not really, I guess,” Wade says. “Though, maybe it’s weird that this isn’t the first time I’m kissing you.”

“I can put the mask back on and it can be our second,” Peter offers.

“How’s your head?” Wade asks, an amused smile on his lips but some worry still sparkling in the corners of his eyes. They wander over Peter’s face.

“You can test it out, if you want to,” Peter smiles, and feels the soft fabric of Wade’s hoodie between his fingers, almost absent mindedly. He glances back at Wade. All he wants is something else to focus on. He wants Wade to distract him.

“Aren’t ya assertive,” Wade laughs.

“I just happen to know what I want,” Peter says. Wade edges his fingers under Peter’s shirt slowly, and Peter hadn’t earlier realized how much he really had wanted Wade to touch his bare skin like that.

“What do you want then?” Wade asks. He licks his lips quickly and glances to the side and Peter wonders if he’s embarrassed. It almost excites him more. He realises that he hadn’t been able to see Wade’s face the previous time. Though, it wasn’t the place he had been looking at anyway. But the idea of seeing Wade’s eyes, his expressions, sounds delicious.

“You,” he says simply.

Wade smiles into the next kiss, which, to be fair, doesn’t make for a good one, but it eases Peter’s mind a lot. He feels something very warm, hot almost, bubbling somewhere within his chest. How amazing, he thinks, as Wade’s hands massage his bare skin under his shirt and jacket, that he can make Wade smile like this.

“Let me make you feel good,” Wade says against Peter’s neck, and he feels pleasant warm shivers run through his body.

They kick their shoes off, and Peter drops Wade’s jacket haphazardly just somewhere on the floor, as he pulls Wade by his hand towards his bedroom.

Wade pulls Peter into a kiss, and they fall unceremoniously on the bed.

“Oh, you’re heavy,” Wade says between kisses. Peter turns his head to the side to laugh. He suddenly feels a strange wave of overwhelming sadness and horror wash over him, but he forgets about it when Wade starts kissing his neck and notices Wade’s hands working his fly open.

Wade flips them over, and Peter finds himself safely lodged between the unmade bed covers and Wade’s broad body. Wade stoops down to kiss him before he gets off of him enough to pull Peter’s jeans off. They stick to his body, and his skin under the clothes is clammy and cold with rain. Peter sits up enough to take his own shirt off.

“Let’s get out of these wet things,” he says, and pushes his hands under Wade’s hoodie and undershirt.

For a moment Wade looks shy when Peter admires his bare chest. It’s true that maybe his skin doesn’t look the best, it’s red and bumpy, and looks like it hurts a lot. Some places have tight, thin skin, like scar is just now forming over it, while others have old, thick and dark tissue covering them already. He runs a hand over Wade’s collarbone and left pec. As if hoping the caress will heal him. In a way he really likes Wade’s skin. He likes how Wade looks, how wide his shoulders are, how tall he is, his eyes, his coarse voice, the fat over his stomach and thighs…

“You look so good,” Peter says, and he has something very aching pulsating in his chest. He can’t tell if it’s Wade or Harry causing the sensation. Perhaps both. Or maybe he’s just grieving himself, he doesn’t know.

There are other bodily sensations he can very easily trace back to Wade. His skin feels hot and sensitive everywhere Wade has touched him, and he has an almost selfish hunger growing in his guts. He pulls Wade into a kiss, and back on top of him. He tries his best to push Wade’s sweatpants off without interrupting the kiss, but he doesn’t succeed. Wade rids himself of his pants and returns back to kiss Peter with an intoxicating hunger.

The kiss is fervent and dirty. Peter runs his hands all over Wade’s back, his chest, his ass, anywhere he can just reach him. Wade caresses his neck and cheek, almost too tenderly. His body movements seem careful and soft, as if Peter is something sweet and delicate to care for. The juxtaposition with the lust behind the kiss makes Peter’s head spin.

He becomes distractingly aware of Wade’s bulge rocking against his thigh and lower stomach. He pushes up just a bit to meet him.

Wade sits up, his eyes hooded and dark. There’s something else in there, too, like tenderness, but mostly want and lust.

“Look at you,” Wade says, and runs his hands over Peter’s body. All the way from his chest to his legs. Peter doesn’t answer, he’s too busy staring at Wade. His arms, chin, chest, anything and everything. His shape is so wonderful, Peter thinks. He wants to do all kinds of things to him. His eyes wander over Wade’s boxers. There’s a small wet spot forming over the tip of his cock. It somehow reminds him of overripe fruit. His mouth waters, and he thinks of juice running from between his lips, over his chin. His hands becoming sticky. It’s a strange, intense, thought.

“Let me make you feel good,” Wade purrs, though he sounds more like a wild animal than a house pet. It gives Peter a slight sense of danger, a reminder of what Wade does for a living, who he is. And as he remembers that, he thinks of Harry and himself. Who _he_ is. Wade thankfully doesn’t hear Peter’s inner thoughts, and takes the initiative to undress Peter completely. Well, besides his socks.

The devious smile Wade flashes at him, before he bends down to kiss Peter’s stomach, swipes his mind clean of all thoughts.

Wade leaves soft feathery kisses all over Peter’s abdomen and thighs before he takes him into his mouth. An unintended gasp falls from Peter’s lips and he has to turn to look away for a second or two as not to get too excited too quickly.

Wade’s mouth is smart, wet and hot. He helps masturbate Peter with one hand, and the other travels across Peter’s upper body, caressing his biceps and chest. Peter takes the hand and presses it against his cheek. Wade’s palm is just as warm as his mouth is. He turns to glance at Wade again, between his legs, and Wade happens to catch his eyes just perfectly. His cheeks are hollowed out, and there’s glistering spit lewdly prettying up his lips, that are sliding up and down Peter’s shaft. Peter blushes at the sight of him, as if this is his very first time and he can’t believe someone is interested enough to kiss him down there.

Wade’s thumb brushes against Peter’s lower lip, and just slips inside his mouth. Peter rolls his tongue against the very tip of the finger, and he can feel Wade humm in pleasure around him. A small whimper forms somewhere inside him, and once one of them emerges from between his lips, he can’t stop them from coming. Wade switches from his thumb to his index and middle finger, and pushes them into Peter’s mouth. That barely silences him, the sounds he’s making still leaking out from his stuffed mouth.

Peter doesn’t know what to focus on, if anything. He finds himself grasping at Wade’s head, guiding him. There’s no hair to grab onto, just scars and aching skin. Peter turns his head to the side, and Wade gets the message to pull his fingers out of his mouth. He leaves wet spots on Peter’s skin, anywhere he touches him with that hand.

“I’m so close,” Peter moans, and can’t decide if he wants Wade’s lips on his mouth or on his cock as he comes. He decides that he wants to kiss him, to gasp into his mouth and have Wade see his face. It seems somehow right, considering that his face had been the part he had withheld from Wade the last time.

He pulls on Wade, and asks him to come up and kiss him. Wade smiles, and Peter’s toes curl at the sight of his puffy and wet lips. His mouth feels hotter against Peter than it had before, and Peter can taste and smell himself on Wade. He pushes Wade’s hand back on his cock, and shows him the rhythm he wants.

It doesn’t take long for Peter to reach the same high as just before. Wade keeps kissing his face even after Peter stops being able to kiss back, pushing his head harder against the bed covers and pillows, and reaching more and more to meet Wade’s fist. He blabbers words he doesn’t even know, and digs his fingers into Wade’s back and arm, as if he’s afraid Wade will suddenly stop and disappear.

He reaches the climax suddenly, it explodes in his chest and ripples across his body like warm summer waves. His come spills over Wade’s hand and his own stomach. He feels out of breath and lax. He can feel Wade’s breathing against his neck, hot and present. Peter turns in sudden energy to kiss Wade passionately, pulling him more over himself. He feels something hot and affectionate between their bodies and he wants to revel in this good feeling.

He notices Wade’s swollen cock pressing against him through his boxers, that they’ve not released him from yet. Peter pushes his hand under the waistband without asking, and Wade sighs deliciously against Peter’s lips. He just barely touches Wade’s cock, feeling like being a tease for a second. He pulls his hand out and runs it across Wade’s side to cup his face.

“What do you want to do?”

“What wouldn’t I want to do to you,” Wade answers. He rolls off Peter and finally undresses from his underwear. His memeber hangs proudly between his legs and Peter can’t help but look.

“Turn over.” Wade smiles. He manhandles Peter to lay on his stomach. He brings his hands under Peter’s pelvis and guides him to arch his spine. Peter pushes his cheek against the bed and can barely see Wade position himself behind him from the corner of his eye. Wade runs his hands on Peter’s back and comments on its beauty.

He bends over him, chest pressing against back.

“Do you have lube?” Wade murmurs into Peter’s ear.

“No,” Peter answers, and Wade barks out a laugh so earthy that it sows flowers into Peter’s heart.

“What 25-year-old doesn’t have lube?”

“I ran out,” Peter explains, his words muffled by embarrassment and the bedding.

“Well, that explains it,” Wade says, and he can hear laughter and endearment in his rough voice. “I wouldn't have lasted long anyway.”

Wade leans back, the warmth of his skin disappearing from Peter’s back. He can feel Wade’s eyes and hands caressing his thighs and ass. Wade runs his cock against Peter’s backside, and then leans back over him, and starts rubbing against his ass.

Wade kisses a constellation on Peter’s skin, and his sighs and hums get lost under the noises he rattles out of Peter. His hand reaches over and grabs at Peter’s half hard cock. It almost feels too much, but he doesn’t want Wade to stop, and he wants him to come, too. To feel good.

Like Wade had said, he doesn’t last long. He pushes his forehead against Peter’s neck and breathes hot and heavy against him. He whines as he comes all over Peter. And then stops moving to calm down. Wade reaches for his shirt that has been tucked under the pillows and wipes Peter’s back clean. Peter turns over and sits up to pull Wade into his embrace. He kisses his neck, his cheek, his lips, and Wade kisses back. They fall on their side. Peter pushes Wade onto his back and climbs on top of him. He rests his head on his chest, and listens how Wade’s heartbeat goes from fast to slow.

His head hurts a bit. His still sore brain had wobbled around his skull when Wade had rutted against him. But he doesn’t regret it at all. The wounds and scrapes at his side don’t hurt, and the bigger cut in his armpit is already healing up nicely. For a long moment he feels very content and warm in Wade’s embrace. He hopes Wade feels the same.

* * *

The rest of the night goes past quickly. Peter tries to make food for them, but manages to burn it. Wade eats it all the same, giving high praises Peter knows are lies.

They take a shower together that isn’t all that pleasurable. Peter’s shower and bathtub are too small for them to be occupying them at the same time. Wade asks about taking a bath sometime, and Peter promises he can take one whenever he pleases.

Somehow Peter manages to evade talking about Harry altogether, but then again, Wade barely asks.

They’re curled up in Peter’s bed. It’s just big enough for the both of them. Wade’s leg hangs off the side, but he doesn’t complain.

“Are you asleep?” Wade asks. The blinds aren’t down, and the light of the city streams in unobstructed. Peter’s eyes are closed, but he can still feel the light on his skin, cold and uninterested.

“No,” Peter answers. Wade shifts a bit next to him. His arm is under Peter’s head, and he’s lying on his back, the other arm lazily draped on his chest. Peter turns more towards him, he catches the small shadow created by Wade’s profile. He can see the inkling of Wade’s eyelashes against the city outside.

“What are you thinking about?” Wade glances at Peter, his head stays turned only halfway towards him. Peter reaches to cover Wade’s hand on his chest with his own.

“My life,” he says quietly.

“What about it?”

“I don’t know, really… I’m thinking about you,” Peter says.

“Me?” He can hear the smile in Wade’s voice.

“Yeah, you,” Peter confirms and smiles himself, too, but only to copy Wade.

“Yeah, okay. What about me?” Wade turns more to look at Peter. The shadow casted by Wade’s head grows smaller and the light hits Peter right into his eyes, and he has to turn away. He turns on his other side, away from Wade, who pulls him back into his arms. One of Wade’s legs slightly pushes between his, and he suddenly feels very safe and loved. He can feel Wade’s breath on his neck. Rhythmic, constant.

“That it’s strange that we met,” Peter confesses. “You know after you gave me a ride to my aunt’s I thought that you’re either stalking me or that we were meant to meet.”

“I didn’t think you as a romantic,” Wade says. There’s an edge of amusement in his voice, but the sentence comes out so light, that Peter is more than sure that Wade’s touched somehow. “Maybe I am stalking you. I heard a rumor once that I abducted you, ya know.”

“Are you really trying to get out of the business or were you just talking?” Peter asks after a while of silence.

“I am trying.” Peter can feel how Wade’s breathing changes, more thoughtful, slower but shallower. “But I can’t promise you an overnight redemption arc speedrun.”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you condemn me?” Wade asks. He moves his arm around Peter, pulling him just a bit closer. Peter moves it a bit so Wade doesn’t press on his stomach uncomfortably.

“Maybe a little. But it would probably be hypocritical of me,” he says, a snide smile just forming at the edge of his lips.

“Of you?”

“Yeah. I. Um,” Peter starts. He feels too vulnerable. He thinks about how wonderful Wade had felt against him earlier, how hot and needy Peter had been. If he could go back to that. If he could go back to even earlier, or stop the time and stay here, to never think about anything again. “Norman Osborn died because of me,” he wants to say “Harry is an orphan because of me,” he wants to continue, “he’s justified in his hate.” But what he says instead is:

“My hands aren’t cleaner than yours.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Then don’t,” Peter says sleepily. What does it matter what Wade believes anyway? His heart beats steadily under his ribcage, so strong that Peter can feel its beats against his back. No wonder Wade is so hot. In all the senses of the word. The different meanings float slowly in his head, like butter being melted and slowly mixed into rich and thick porridge. Intense, sexy, burning, violent, impulsive, warm… Such a strong heart, Peter repeats in his mind. Wade’s heavy hand reaching around Peter’s waist feels grounding and sweaty.

“Are you asleep?” Wade asks again after a while, and this time Peter is.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The end is drawing nearer! Sorry for the longer wait, hope you didn't loose all interest in the meantime lmao. I had a lot of things going on at once, and I wanted to take a little break w this work anyway. I am committed to finishing it, though, so don't worry about that !  
> I hope this chapter was good :) It's a long one haha (if you're interested this chapter is about 26 pages)
> 
> Take care everyone, and I'll see you in the next (and final!) chapter!


	10. brothers

Peter’s at the top of Fisk tower. The city is hauntingly empty. There are no lights, just the endless starry night sky and the biggest moon Peter’s ever seen in his life.

He’s all alone. A warm wind blows past him, and he realises he’s wearing his Spider-Man suit, but this one is different from his current one. It’s the one he had worn when he had been younger. The same style when Gwen had died, when Mr. Osborn had died. Somehow it doesn’t feel repelling this time. His gloves are clean, and he takes one of them off to see if his skin is tainted red under the cool moonlight.

His skin looks clean and almost blue.

He sits down at the edge of the rooftop, and let’s his gaze lazily wander over the view. The sky looks boundless. He realizes he’s never seen this many stars at once. He scarcely sees any stars ever.

“Don’t kill him,” Gwen says. She’s sitting next to him. He’s not startled by her presence, somehow he already knew she was here with him.

“Kill who?” he asks.

“Harry,” she says. She looks upwards, at the stars. Her hair glitters in their light, as if she’s one of them.

“Why would I kill Harry?”

“He’s not his father, you know that.” She turns to look at him. Seeing her now, face to face, like she’s alive and well makes Peter’s heart hurt. She has a small smile on her lips, and her hair moves with the wind. She has summer clothes on, and Peter wonders if she’s cold. He has no jacket to offer her.

“I really did love you,” he says. Gwen has a fleetingly sorrowful look flash in her eyes, and then she blinks it away. She reaches to pull Peter’s mask off.

“I think he’s gonna kill me,” Peter says quietly.

“No,” she disagrees.

“You sound like MJ.”

“I sound like you,” she corrects, “don’t kill him.”

“I won’t. I couldn’t,” he tells her. She leans in to kiss him, like she had when they were younger. He closes his eyes, and as he opens them again, he only sees a flash of movement, and Gwen is gone.

He turns to look at the street below, but she’s not there either.

“I won’t,” he repeats.

Peter wakes up. He’s facing the wall. He reaches from under the covers to touch it with his hand. It doesn’t feel cold, but it probably should, he thinks. He turns to his side, and finds the bed empty. Wade’s gone.

He swallows slowly, and considers if he feels betrayed. But he doesn’t. Somehow he knows that Wade is in his apartment still, and as on cue he hears something come crashing down in the kitchen, and Wade swearing. It makes Peter smile a bit, and for a moment he lives in a world where he’s happy. But it doesn’t last long. Gwen’s still on his mind, and she reminds him of Harry.

Peter doesn’t want to get up, he doesn’t even want to be awake. But once the sleep is gone, it’s impossible to catch again.

He slowly walks into the kitchen. Wade’s fully dressed already, and he smiles radiantly as he spots Peter.

“You didn’t have bacon, so I bought some,” he says, and shows him the pan with half-cooked meat sizzling on it.

“I don’t feel like bacon,” Peter says. His stomach feels like it’s upside down and inside out. He can’t imagine eating a single thing today.

“Oh,” Wade says. He looks more closely at Peter, and his eyes become soft with worry.

“I’ll just have some toast,” Peter smiles a bit. He doesn’t want to upset Wade suddenly.

Eating breakfast seems to take forever. Everything he puts into his mouth turns into gluey putty that’s impossible to swallow, and everything that comes out of his mouth turns into worthless puffs of wasted air.

Wade eats a lot. Peter thinks that it’s funny how he seems to be the type of person whose appetite is not affected by a negative atmosphere. He collects the plates from the table and sets them aside. He gets stuck staring at the bacon grease on Wade’s plate. He wonders if he’s ever before woken up and known this could be the last day he has. In some ways it’s nice, that he hadn’t needed to start the wicked day alone.

He walks past Wade back into the bedroom, he runs his fingers across Wade’s shoulders as he goes by. The tips of his fingers tingle pleasantly. Wade comes after him.

“Freaky!” Wade laughs as Peter jumps to the ceiling and pulls his only extra Spider-Man suit from the box on top of his bookcase. “I always thought it was your suit that made that possible.”

“Nah, I’m sticky by nature,” Peter smiles a bit and drops down. He feels tense, horrible even. And for once Wade’s presence isn’t helping him get distracted. All he can really think about is Gwen, Harry, and his impending doom. He pushes his bedcover to the side, and lays his suit on the mattress.

The suit is all black with some deep red details on the sides and chest. Peter very rarely wears this one, he hasn’t had the need for it in a while. He pats some creases out of it, and the fabric feels static and alive under his palms. It reminds him a lot of Wade’s Deadpool suit, now that he looks at it closer.

“Sexy,” Wade comments.

“It’s really not my style.”

“I think black suits you. You should try leather next, or latex,” Wade says, and he winks at Peter as he turns to glance at him. It makes him blush. “I’ve never seen you in this one.”

“Yeah, well, that’s kinda the point of a stealth suit,” he smiles.

“What’s this Osborn thing, then?” Wade finally asks. Peter had thought that he’d feel scared to tell Wade. He had thought he’d feel something, anything, really, but now that the moment’s come he just feels the words come out as a tired sigh. A confession long overdue.

“I killed his dad.”

Wade doesn’t answer. Peter steps to the side a bit, to create a slightly greater distance between the two of them. He rolls one of the web shooters in his hands and waits until Wade’s done buffering.

“Did you hear me?” he asks when Wade doesn’t say anything. He chucks the web shooter onto the bed, and it settles just on top of the suit.

“In cold blood? I. I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t meet your heroes?”

“I don’t regret meeting you,” Wade says. He looks too big and awkward all of a sudden. Peter wants him to go away, to leave him to deal with his own problems by himself. Stupid Wade, he thinks, why does he even care.

“We have a lot more in common than I thought,” Wade remarks and Peter feels a sting in his chest, and he hates Wade and he hates himself.

“Norman Osborn is dead because of me,” he bites out, as if he’s fighting with Wade. “And I’ve hurt and lied to Harry about it. For years. I’m meeting him tonight. He’ll-” he doesn’t finish his sentence. _He’ll get what he wants, everything will end tonight_ , he wants to say, but doesn’t. “I think I’m finally getting what I deserve, you know. Payback.”

“I know who Norman Osborn was,” Wade says, and he has the same gentleness in his voice as MJ does. The same soft movements as yesterday night. Peter wants to be angry, for Wade to turn on him and yell. But Wade’s too nice, too good. “You’re not a bad person, Peter.”

“Of course _you_ would say that,” Peter says.

“We-I think that most people would say that.” Wade furrows his brows, and tries to come closer, but Peter takes another step back.

“Whatever.”

“Hey, Spidey, I really do mean that. Don’t go into this battle if you’re already given up,” he says, and has something strange in his eyes. Something like love, and it terrifies Peter. “I like living idiots, remember?”

“He’s not gonna kill me,” Peter says, but doesn’t believe it himself for a second. “This is something I have to do. I… I appreciate your concern, but we barely know each other, Wade. Let me make my own decisions.”

Wade opens and closes his mouth without saying much. Peter crosses his arms over his chest, as if he’s forming a cage around his stupid heart that’s beating against his bones like it’s about to die.

“I could, you know, fix it. For ya,” Wade says quietly.

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I think you do understand. Some pro bono work. You get it,” Wade coaxes him. It takes a moment for Peter to understand what he means by that, but when it clicks Peter feels his skin burn, something ugly gnarl in his guts, and his nerves squirm like eels.

“That’s disgusting.”

“We’re just talking,” Wade says, “just so you’re aware, it’s on the table.”

“Are you always this charitable, or am I special because I let you fuck me?” Peter asks.

“As I remember it, you’re the one who kissed me first,” Wade says back. He says it quietly, accusingly, but not angry. And somehow that pisses Peter off more.

“Get out, Wade. Go home,” he says. He wants to be alone, to wallow in his own misery.

“I’m sorry, Webs. Sometimes I-” Wade starts, but Peter cuts him off;

“No, I… I don’t want to be with you right now. Go away, or I’ll go.”

“Peter, I’m sorry, I’m sorry I even suggested it. You’re right, it is disgusting. But please, let me help you. I don’t want you to die.”

“It is disgusting,” Peter agrees. For a moment he wonders why he’s being so mean to Wade. Why he’s picking a fight with him, but he’s too worked up to make sense of anything. All he understands is that he needs to be alone. For a moment he needs to be a no one, in silence, without Wade. Or Gwen, whose picture keeps returning to his mind. Her blonde hair framing her face, warm silky skin, and pale freckles. Hands reaching helplessly towards him. Wind in his ears. She had smiled in the dream, but somehow he can never see her in other people’s smiles, just in their horror and sadness.

The breakfast tumbles in his stomach and he feels sick. He tries to blink Gwen’s picture out of his eyes, and grabs Wade by his arm and starts pulling him out of the room.

“Peter!”

Peter had been correct, he is stronger than Wade. It’s almost too easy to throw him out.

“Don’t come after me,” he says as he closes the front door between them. Wade bangs on it and pleads him to open it. Peter wonders how well mannered Wade is, and if he’ll eventually kick his door in. He comes to the conclusion that Wade is the type of person to pry doors open and act like a dramatic idiot. And because Peter, too, is a dramatic idiot, he dresses up into his stealth suit and slips out of the window.

* * *

He wastes most of his day. Eventually he finds himself near the lab. It’s really the last place he wants to be at, but he keeps finding himself getting drawn to the place. It’s not even close to the evening. He settles on a rooftop overlooking the docs and the grand Oscorp building. Hunger tightens his insides. Or worry. Either or.

He taps on the roof and on an impulse pulls out his phone and calls Aunt May. He has a dozen texts from Wade, and even a few from MJ. He decides that none of them are worth reading.

“Hey, May,” Peter says.

“What’s wrong, Peter?” she asks immediately. She’s always had this strange ability to tell when Peter’s not alright. But he never lets her in. He wonders how much she must be hurting because of that. He feels his heart ache and he hates himself.

“I… Nothing. I’m just stressed,” he lies.

“You know I’m always here for you, right?”

“Yeah,” he smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. He looks at the sea, how its surface glimmers in the sun. For a moment he thinks of the first time he had met Wade. He had said that it had been the middle of Peter’s story, but he had been wrong. It had been the beginning of his end.

All this had been coming for him. Slowly, for years. Creeping closer and closer. He could try to run away once more, but he won’t. This one time he won’t take the cowards way out.

“I have to go,” he says to the phone, “I just… I love you very much.”

“Peter, are you sure you’re alright? Are you in trouble?” He can hear the worry and rising panic in Aunt May’s voice. He feels like something has clasped around his heart. Piercing and cold.

“I love you,” he repeats, and waits a second for her to say it back, but she doesn’t. She asks again, more worriedly, if he’s safe, what’s going on.

“I’m sorry, May,” he says and hangs up. Her last sentence gets cut off, and Peter feels tears climbing behind his eyes, but he doesn’t cry. He closes his phone, so she can’t call him back.

He thinks that he’s a horrible nephew. Aunt May deserves better.

But he’s all she’s got.

He realises how terrible that is.

He stares at the sea. The sun’s reflection hurts his eyes, but he can’t look away. He sits alone for a long time. Long enough for the sun to start setting, and the city to change into its party dress. The sea becomes black, and the sun’s warm light gets replaced with a neon one. He wonders how he let this day slip by, like water through cracks on the asphalt.

His jaw is sore from clenching his teeth together. He looks down at the Oscorp building, and it looks dead. He doesn’t see Harry anywhere. He gets up clumsily and jumps off the building to swing over to the lab’s roof. He doesn’t really know what to expect. Maybe Harry won’t show up. He naively wishes.

But he does. He’s already there. He’d been waiting for him for a long while, and he emerges from his cover as soon as he spots Peter swinging closer.

Peter lands on the other side of the rooftop. He can feel the wind picking up and whooshing past him. If he didn’t have his mask on, the wind would ruffle his hair. The city’s lights reflect almost beautifully on Harry’s armor. He takes a few steps closer to him, but stops on his tracks and stands threateningly still. The hoverboard is nowhere to be seen, but Peter trusts that it’s somewhere here, just waiting for its master's call.

“Spider-Man!” Harry yells over the wind. His voice has been augmented by the suit, but Peter can still hear the human edge under there. He can hear Harry, as he is.

Peter keeps his mouth shut. He tries to open it, but his tense jaw won’t do it. Harry stalks closer. There’s a hostile energy surrounding him, but Peter’s senses tell him that there is no imminent danger of violence. Harry’s just agitated.

“Can you hear me?” Harry asks. Peter just nods. He feels the same sticky feeling on his hands, and he worries it won’t ever go away.

“Why won’t you say anything?!” Harry yells frustrated. He comes closer, shortening the already too small distance between them. He comes to a standstill just a few meters away from him.

Peter feels stuck. What can he say? What should he say?

If he can hear and recognize Harry’s voice, then who’s to say that Harry couldn’t recognize his?

“The famous quipping spider has nothing to say?” Harry says, “In videos you never seem to shut up, but now that I’ve got you here, you have nothing to say? You do know why I want to talk to you, right?”

Peter nods again.

“SPEAK YOU COWARD!”

Peter can feel tingling at the base of his skull, a warning running through his nerves, but he doesn’t react quick enough to dodge Harry, as he leaps towards him. Maybe he never intended to fight him, he thinks. He falls gracelessly on his back, Harry on top of him. He shakes his shoulders violently and Peter hits the back of his head on the roof.

Harry screams at him. Hoarse, worn, but heated. He demands to know who he is. Why had he done such a horrible deed. His armor feels burning cold even through Peter’s suit.

He doesn’t answer.

Harry’s fingers wrap around his neck. Peter’s vision flashes and he’s not sure where he is and with who, Mr. Osborn or Harry. The green fingernails dig into his skin and tear fabric out of their way. Harry is more brutal than his father had been. He takes no pleasure in the action, but does it because he has some inner fire driving his actions. A desperate need.

Peter’s brain short-circuits, and for a good moment, where he can’t breathe, where his eyes water and his lungs feel like collapsing on themselves, he’s convinced that this has probably always been the way he’s supposed to go. He had somehow survived the last time, but isn’t it only some universal will? Where the first Green Goblin had failed, a second was sent to finish the job.

Peter feels like crying. Harry’s knees push down on his arms, and his armor feels cold, cold like death, against his suit. He doesn’t want to die. At the very least he can’t go before he can beg for forgiveness. Who cares about forgetting. Fuck forgetting. Harry has to hear it from him, he owes him that much, he realises with a desperate fury. Harry deserves to hear from Peter what had happened, why he had done what he had.

Peter rips his right arm free from under Harry, with such force and strength that he’s almost impressed by it, but it’s the last thing that matters right now. Peter doesn’t try to hit Harry, he doesn’t try to loosen the grip around his neck, all he does is to pull the mask off his face, revealing himself to him.

There is a moment where Peter stares straight at the Green Goblin mask, without seeing Harry’s eyes or face. The lenses on the mask reflect Peter’s dying face back to him. He can’t say anything, no air travels through his windpipe. His vision blurs with tears. He tries to blink them away, but the tears just run over his cheeks. Suddenly he can’t stop crying, and he feels like he’s dying that much faster. His body tries to desperately breathe and the crying just makes his chest convulse and scream more about the painful death, already pushing its hands against Peter’s skin, slipping just the tips of its fingers under it.

“No,” Peter hears Harry say, but it sounds so far away that he’s not even sure anything has been said.

“No. No. NO!” Harry’s voice turns into yells, and Peter feels the grip around his neck loosening and then disappearing completely. He can suddenly breathe again, and he takes in huge breaths, and they come out as snivels that Peter just can’t stifle. Harry’s recoiled away, he sits stunned just next to him. Peter crawls backwards, but he has no strength to move too far away.

“I’m sorry,” Peter tries to say, but his voice comes out as noise. A loud static cry. The tears won’t stop coming and they replace themselves as fast as Peter can wipe them away. He glances at the mask lying next to him. The lights pool on its lenses, as if they are tears.

“Anyone but you…”

“Forgive me, Harry,” Peter says, but isn’t sure if Harry even hears him. He gets up more and tries to catch his breath.

“Not you, Peter. Why must it be you?”

“Harry.” Peter doesn’t know what to do. He can just cry and beg.

Harry takes his mask off. And it’s the same Harry he has always been. He has never changed, Peter can see it now. He understands.

“If I could do everything differently, I would. I would,” Peter says between his tears.

Harry doesn’t cry, but his eyes are red and his mouth twitches.

“I-” Harry starts. Then the dam finally breaks and he bursts into tears. “What are we doing here, Peter?” he cries.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you kill him? Please, just tell me. Did you do it?”

“No. No, I didn’t,” he says after a moment of silence, the words feel sharp like broken glass, “but I was there. I could have stopped it. But I didn’t.”

“What happened?”

“He…” Peter doesn’t want to answer. He knows how important Mr. Osborn had been to Harry. Even after all the abuse he had suffered from him. And isn’t it only human to want to know what happened? To solve the mystery?

“The hoverboard. It impaled him. He tried-” Peter swallows painfully and the tears won’t stop coming, “he tried to strangle me. To kill me.”

“Why?” Harry’s voice is stilted.

“He said-he said it would make him powerful, that everyone would fear him.”

Harry looks at him for a long while. His stare is empty. The plumb tears run down his cheeks and he doesn’t bother to wipe them away. Peter gets up more. His heart is beating so fast that it hurts.

“Harry…”

“I always knew he was… that he-” he doesn’t finish.

“You’re my brother,” Harry stumbles over his words and swallows some of them away, “You’re blood.”

“I’m so sorry.”

Harry looks at him, and he has Gwen’s eyes. Peter wants to look away, but he can’t.

“Why did you hide it? Why did you bring him there, for me to find?”

“I don’t know,” Peter confesses. He hadn’t known what else to do. “I didn’t want you to know who he really was. I-I guess in some sense I wanted to protect you from him, this one last time. But I just hurt you more.”

“You knew that I saw you. That I saw you leave him there, undress him,” Harry says, and Peter can taste the bitter venom in his voice.

“Yes, I knew.”

“Why must it be you?” Harry looks at his hands, as if he’s only now realising what he’s wearing. “My father. He-”

“Would you have killed me, if-if I was someone else?” Peter asks quietly. He had been convinced that Harry would have done it. He had been waiting for it, accepted it even. The wind calms down a bit, and the noise of the city seems to get stronger.

Peter wonders again about the other people, the people who live here and have real lives. What are they doing right now?

“Yes,” Harry breathes out, ashamed and disgusted, “I would have.”

“I forgive you,” Peter says suddenly, what he has to say feels important. Tears glimmer on Harry’s face and he looks confused.

“What are you forgiving?” he asks.

“That I saw the worst in you. I’m sorry I forgot. I forgot who you were, why I loved you.” His voice is still strained, and breathing hurts more than it ever should. “ I’m sorry, I lied to you. I hurt you. You never deserved to feel this betrayed.”

Harry stares at him. His hair looks greasy and sticks up in an unattractive way. His eyes are puffy and red and his lips tremble. Peter probably looks worse.

“I’m sorry,” he answers quietly, “we’re both kind of stupid.”

“Speak for yourself,” Peter says without thinking, his voice still weak.

“There you are,” Harry manages to smile a bit. Peter’s eyes feel hot with tears.

“What now?” Peter asks. He can’t imagine moving on from this. He had tried for years to turn the page, and now that he’d reached the end of it, it seems that he doesn’t want to see what’s on the other side after all.

“I don’t know, Peter. I-I need a moment.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Of course I am. Of course I am. I hate you, Peter. More than anyone,” Harry laughs between his tears. Light and airy. It rings in the air a bit, and then gets carried away by the wind. “But I love you, too. Isn’t that how all brothers feel?”

“I don’t know. I’m an only child,” Peter says. Harry’s smile spreads on his lips, too. It tastes wet and salty, like the sea wallowing behind them.

“I am, too.”

“Yeah,” Peter sighs. He suddenly feels so tired that he could fall asleep right this moment. Harry has run out of tears, and he tries to dry his face with his armored glove, but it doesn’t work.

“I. I won’t kill you. I’m sorry I tried,” Harry says, “We’ve had enough death, don’t you think.”

Peter laughs. It comes as bursts between his snivels, and he doesn’t know what to do or think.

“I’m sorry,” he says again.

Harry gets up enough to drag himself closer to Peter. He then drapes his arms around him and pulls him into a painfully tight hug. They sit like that for a long while. The armor grows warm against Peter’s skin, and he cries into the crook of Harry’s shoulder.

* * *

Peter digs his fingers into the crack between the window and the brick wall. Wade’s bed sits waiting and empty on the other side of the glass. The apartment looks dark and calm. The window reflects Peter’s picture back at himself. His mask, he, looks how he always has, but it doesn’t repel him anymore. He finds his own reflected movement almost soothing. The window doesn’t want to give in, and so he pulls on it so much that he can hear the lock break. Wade probably won’t care, he’s never seemed to be the type of person who minds his environment too much. At least judging by his apartment.

He slides the window open and climbs inside and right onto Wade’s bed. It’s softer than he expected. He turns to close the window, and the reflection of him is gone. It’s just the city now.

New York hasn’t changed at all. It carries on with the same pace as it has always done. But something feels different. Peter pulls his mask off, and his breath gathers on the glass and fogs it up. He makes his way to the kitchen and eats the leftover pineapple pizza Wade has stashed in there, straight from the refrigerator.

Peter goes back into the bedroom. Strange, how this is the first time he’s ever seen it. It’s cramped and messy. Wade has a pile of books on the floor, but they look untouched. Comics, guns, and a pair of extra Deadpool boots neatly tucked just under the bed. The walls are mostly bare, but Wade has hung up two posters over the bed, and next to one of them is a short letter taped to the wall. Peter doesn’t read it, but he can see that it has been signed off by Wade’s daughter.

He undresses from the rest of his suit, and leaves them on the floor. He slips under the covers and feels with his arms how big and empty the bed is. He wonders when Wade will come home. He thinks about MJ, and how he should call her. But not now, he doesn’t want to. He suddenly thinks of Aunt May and feels shame burning deep in his chest. He reaches for his suit on the floor, and pulls out his phone and calls her.

“Peter! Are you okay?” Aunt May’s voice sounds panicked. He wonders what agony she must have been in.

“Hi May. I’m… I’m alright,” he says, and his voice still sounds winded and like he’s been crying.

“Where are you?” she asks.

“I’m at Wade’s. I’m sorry I scared you.”

“Petey, you _do_ know that I love you very much?” He smiles. Of course he knows that, what a stupid thing to ask.

“Yes. I. I’ll call you later, okay? I just wanted you to know that… nothing bad happened to me,” he says. He pulls on the cover and dreams about Wade.

“You’re scaring me.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’m alright, really. This time I am okay, I promise,” he says, and for once he really feels like he’s not lying. It makes him smile. He’ll tell her the truth, all of it, soon, he decides. He’s already had some practice.

“I love you,” Aunt May says.

“I love you, too, May.”

Peter lays on his side, his arms stretched out, staring at the bedroom’s closed door. His head feels empty. For once. There isn’t a single worry swimming in there, just content loneliness, the notion of warm bed covers on his chest, and a worn smell of someone else. He turns to his other side, to look out of the window. From where he is, he can just barely see the black sky behind the hazy dark gray clouds and tall buildings. It slowly turns from a mixture of black and orange to a dreamy light pink. He falls asleep waiting for Wade. Waiting for Harry to change his mind, to come to his senses.

Only one of those things comes true when he wakes up. He doesn’t wake up confused, hurried, scared or cold, not even angry. He wakes up to the sound of the frontdoor’s lock clicking open, heavy boots walking in and Wade talking to someone. Peter’s body feels heavy, but heavy only with sleep. He has slept through the whole day. His heart feels light, and the dusk in the room feels comforting and safe. It’s a strange feeling. He thinks about getting up, about yelling a greeting to Wade, but he does neither. He instead waits for him to walk into the bedroom himself.

Wade comes in eventually, he’s in the middle of a heated conversation with what looks to be no one. He freezes mid-sentence and drops whatever he was holding before in his hands. It drops onto the floor with a soft thump. The light pours into the bedroom from the open door, and colors only half of Wade’s body. He’s still mostly in his suit. The belt and katanas are gone, and he looks almost incomplete somehow.

“Peter?” Wade asks. His tone is soft, and Peter thinks it suits his voice very well.

“Hi,” he answers from between the soft bed covers.

“I looked for you.”

“Found me,” Peter smiles sheepishly.

“Yeah, found you.” Wade pulls his mask off, and his gaze is concerned. Peter blinks sleep out of his eyes slowly. All he wants is Wade, right here, next to him.

“What happened?” Wade asks, he walks closer to Peter, and Peter reaches for him from under the covers, but can’t quite catch him.

“It-” Peter starts, and for a moment he doesn’t know what to say. He hadn’t expected to live this far, everything seems quite surreal and dreamy. Everything is well. He has everything he needs right at his fingertips. “I have a brother, after all.”

Wade smiles at him. He takes his gloves off slowly, and kicks the boots off as well. Peter sits up on the bed, the cover pools onto his legs. The air feels colder, but it hardly matters, summer is just about here. Wade undresses from his suit, and slips into the bed, next to Peter, who pulls him into his arms hungrily.

Wade’s skin feels hotter than the air trapped under the cover. The light flows into the bedroom from the living room, delicately, like melting snow. Wade’s eyes catch the light and look very beautiful; pale and waiting. His features are soft and strong, and Peter thinks that he might love him.

“I’m sorry,” Wade says.

“It’s alright. I am, too.”

“Are you okay, Webs?” he asks.

Peter looks at Wade, and for a long while he says nothing.

“No. I don’t think I will ever be. But I’ll try,” he finally answers.

“That’s alright. We can be not-okay together.”

“Yeah. I’d like that.”

“It’s a deal then,” Wade smiles. He reaches to caress Peter’s cheek, and then guides him softly into a kiss so gentle, that it almost makes him cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, commenting, and leaving kudos! This has truly been a ride. I couldn’t have ever even imagined where this story would eventually take me (even tho I did have it more or less planned out!) I’ve had so much fun, y’all can’t even imagine !
> 
> I feel like I’ve grown as a writer a LOT when writing this, and I can’t wait to get to work on other Spideypool projects in the future :) ! This has really been a big learning curve for me. And to be quite honest, I personally detest the first two chapters. They fucking suck lmao. There are a lot of other things I would now do differently, but I don’t think I’ll do any heavy editing on this story after posting this final chapter, just some typos and maybe some small stuff. I’m being pretty cruel towards my own work, I know, but the truth is, if I hadn’t written out those bad scenes I now dislike, we wouldn’t ever have gotten here. And so I’m grateful that I did write them and post them, cringey as they are. I had a lot of fun, and got to know myself and these characters a lot better in the process.
> 
> One thing I’d really want to hear from y’all, is that do _you_ think this story needs an epilogue? I had planned for one (it would include (at least): Wade finally getting his bath, some fluffy established relationship stuff, and a cute picnic with the whole gang), but now after I’ve finished this final chapter, idk if the story needs to be continued at all. So, if you’re really dying for that bath scene, let me know!
> 
> Anyway! Once again, a big thank you for reading my silly little drabble (that is 140 pages long, not including scenes, etc, that I edited out..), I had a lot of fun and I hope you did too!
> 
> Peter and Wade send their love as well uwu


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